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Wireless Web Design


Guest Jonathan

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Guest Jonathan

:P Hmmm, Has anyone designed for the phones and pda's? Do you need to know XML? Or is it more about getting the aspect ratio right?

I logged on from my Samsung N400 and had no problems. I went to my other companies site and it looked like crap!

This is something that's going to be popular soon and i wanted some tips on designing for it.

Let's talk about it!

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Hey,

I have never designed for pda´s or phones. But i have heard that its quite hard becouse it dont exist any standards between the diffrent phone and pda brands. But as i said this is just what i have heard so dont trust me on this :P

Im gona ask a friend of mine later so ill answer again later today or tomorrow

Have a nice day! :D

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It depends what browser the handset has got. My Nokia 7110 has a crappy WAP browser which isn't worth a carrot, but the Handspring Treo has a HTML-compatible browser, as do many of the higher end PDA's. WAP is dead in the water :P

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Guest Jonathan

Out of boredom I surfed for while and stumbled on this site called yourwap.com that has software that you can download and preview sites from different phones.

I know my Sprint phones can handle html. I am not sure about other carriers. I am thinking you could design for these devices by making a small 'micro' version of you website.?. :P

For some reason I have a feeling that things in that area are about to pick up. I find myself doing small things online on my phone when stuck or need information. I know I check weather forecast and the movies from time to time.

:D The whole idea seems cool to me and something I want to learn more about.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Guest wildmalc

If you are still interested I have done a huge amount of work with wireless commerce for PDA and WAP devices, including working for Nokia and several wireless carriers as consultant and developer.

The easist way to do it is make all your source data is XML and then do XSLT based on incoming useragent, e.g. if useragent=Nokia7650, content type = text/wml xsl="xsl/nokia/7650.xsl" etc. you get the idea.

The only issue is that cubecart is not designed to be easliy templated as much of the presentation layer, is knitted into the data and code layer. My best advice would be if you wanted to do a mobile version, is to write a totally independant front end, e.g store/mobile/ and all the mobile specific PHP pulls from the original database but displays in a more simplistic manner.

Things to watch out for.

1) content type, ensure your code responds with the correct head e.g. WML/HTML

2) Forget anything to do with tables, its a waste of time just <p> and <br/>

3) Dont forget WML is XML or now its closer to XHTML so keep your tags in XHTML format, e.g. lower case tag names etc.

4) Get some good emulators WAP www.nokia.com/www.openwave.com

5) Keep the cart simple as the screen resolution and user input on mobile devices is very limiting. Users wont want to be order and having to enter lots of input data. Sometimes best to allow them to browse, take their number and call them back to do the ccard order.

6) Images, Progressive JPEGs are support on most WML devices GIFs only on early handset some do support baseline JPEGs but its not part of the WAP standards

7) If you dont have alot of mobile customers dont bother its alot of hard work for a minority of total users to most sites. A PDA/XHTML versions of the site is pretty easy to do and support simple JavaScript and CSS functions so it will look more like the proper site.

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  • 1 month later...
Guest Jonathan

I will look into all of that. I just read the recent issue of a mag. that talks about m-commerce growing. I think it will. It makes a lot of sense to me.

It's going to be fun to watch it grow.

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