How to make your website mobile today

It's 2010 and your users are on smartphones and iPads. Here's how to make sure your website is too

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The end result is shown in Figures 4 through 8. No, they aren't identical; with screen sizes that vary as much as these devices do, they shouldn't be. But they're all clear and readable, and that's what matters when you're on the move.

Figure 4
Figure 4:
Figure 5
Figure 5:
Figure 6
Figure 6:

Figure 7
Figure 8

With some simple Web technologies, it's not difficult to make your site feel friendly to even the smallest among us. Hopefully, you've seen that you can get a start without a whole lot of effort.

After you've become comfortable with these techniques, you can take the next step and work with the user agent detection method I described for Android. From there, you can detect other devices and load specific style sheets for each to invoke more layout-oriented CSS functions. For example, you may end up showing and hiding divs, placing divs in different locations, or actually changing the layout of a Web page based on the mobile device accessing it -- but that's for another day.

This article, "How to make your website mobile today," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in mobile technology and programming at InfoWorld.com.

Copyright © 2010 IDG Communications, Inc.

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