Budget Homes

Submitted by bogar on Sun, 2009-05-17 05:07. Drupal | Mobile Browsing

Creating a drupal theme for mobile phones is not technical issue. It is methodological issue. We have to change our approach while designing theme for mobile phones.

I remember few years back, I set the width of a website to 800/777 pixel. Then to 1000/1025 pixel. Width increased when the monitor's resolution increased.

The width of a webpage is decided by the resolution of the monitor.

As far as mobile phones assume that we have a 'monitor' its width is 200 pixel (average). We have to design a webpage within the 200x200 resolution. This is the approach we have to follow when designing websites for mobile phones.

You can use any technology like WAP, XML, XHTML, FLASH, ADOBE AR, HTML or etc. The challenge is an average width of 200 pixel is available to you. You have pack and show everything within the 200 pixel.

By any case, it is a complete (re)design of a website according to the resolution of the device being used to browse. There is no 'turn key' solution to create or 'convert' mobile themes.

There may be various 'best practices' may evolve like avoid images, javascript, long text, and etc. Of course the memory capacity of mobile phone may be lesser than desktop computer.

As per your business model and audience, you have to decide whether to display images or textual information or both. But everything should be accommodated within the resolution available to you.

Apart from resolution and width, there is no big difference between desktop computers and mobile websites.

For mobile sites, I prefer to simple HTML and CSS than WML or WAP cards.

This is a drupal site, and I have made a simple theme for mobile browsers. I detect the User Agent of the browser. Based on the user agent I switch to mobile theme or normal theme.

Please see this site in mobile browser or simulator. Hope without any difficulty you can view in your mobile browser.

Your feedback is appreciated.