Going mobile

I have just finished creating a new mobile site for Crown St Veterinary Hospital. After pondering over several possible ways to go I eventually decided to create a whole new site in a subdomain- m.crownvet.com.au

I decided against using the existing site and just applying a new theme as it contained too many images and therefore would take too long to download. The site was created using drupal with a zen theme. The images are few and far between and those that are there are compressed enough to download quite quickly. Moving the content over was just a matter of cut and paste with a few minor modifications.

The mobile site degrades nicely for use in a mobile phone with poor css support but looks good as well on a more advanced device such as the iphone.

I spent alot of time ensuring the site was easy to navigate and have included a skip to navigation link at the top of the page which skips to the navigation which is at the bottom of the page. At the top of the page I also included a jump list using the a drupal contributed jump module. This makes it easy for uses to select the page they want from a drop down list.

In the footer I have included an option to switch to the main website in case someone finds the site while on their PC or is incorrectly pointed to the mobile site. The other thing is people may not want a cut-down version and so even if on a mobile may want to see your full site and I know from experience that having to re-enter a new url can be a real nuisance. It is far better to have a hyperlink to follow.

The mobile web is growing rapidly especially with the iphone and all it's competitors gaining widespread acceptance. You can actually browse the internet well on the iphone and read sites that aren't made for the mobile web. If your customers may be using the mobile web it is time to start thinking about getting your website mobile.