Making your site visible to PDA's/ Mobile Phones.

[Dal123]

Recently just got a new phone with internet browser on it. Pretty darn cool, was amazed how many sites had problems with it though. Had to go through a couple of different sites on ebay to view it as I view on my computer; I recon they've got their own special one to view just items (which has it's good points of not being cluttered).
So just thought; should I make my site compatible with pda's/ mobile phones; obviously this is what I should do. But remember; this is my first site and I know very very little about web design .

 

[Cabbit]

Try installing the Opera browser on your phone you'll find that many more websites work with it and almost every site works with mobile Safari on the iPhone.
I would not put any effort into reworking your website to working with mobile IE its just a waste of time as it does not take very long before the user gives up trying to load and navigate websites with it. However one thing you could do if you wanted to go the extra mile is have your site disable the stylesheet for mobile ie.

 

[Dal123]

Cool, is it tricky to do that?

 

[angelwatt]

If you have web stats monitoring your site you can see the browser agent being used. This will help you identify how many mobile devices are visiting your site. Not too many sites need to worry too much about it though. Generally, if you take things like accessibility and usability into consideration when making your site, it'll work reasonably well on mobile devices. Alternatively, you could browser sniff and figure out if the visitor is using a mobile device and redirect them to a simpler web page layout. That takes a lot of extra work though and hard to test sufficiently due to the large number of mobile devices that identify them self differently.