One of our newest clients, Desert Elite Cup (DEC), recently took the next big step in bringing the most up-to-date technology to their fans, players, and coaches, a site targeting the mobile phone market. As we all know, using your internet-enabled phone to access web sites is at most a "hit or miss" proposition. Downloading content rich sites can be a never ending wait at mobile broadband speeds. Now there are choices. You can wait for the standard site to load, or you can choose to access the much faster loading mobile version of their site.
Depending on the client requirements, C2C uses various customized content management systems (CMS) to manage our client websites. The days of keeping website content current and fresh on a site using static pages are long gone. When DEC approached us to develop a mobile version of their new site, we immediately knew what direction to take the request. For those of you who are more "Geek" than not, the run down of the tools we used follow:
>> Primary CMS - Joomla 1.5
>> Mobile Traffic Handler - Mobile Joomla (MJ)
Mobile Joomla is an add-on component that installs over the top of a traditional Joomla CMS. It evalutates the incoming traffic requests, and then makes decisions whether to render the site in a standard PC-based browser mode, or whether to render the site in a very light, fast loading mobile mode. Mobile Joomla has the ability to support all types of internet-enabled PDA browsers, and render the site specifically tailored to the unique requirements of a particular browser.
While it is no doubt the easiest and quickest to just let MJ do his thing with your standard site content, it is not always optimal. The content is readable and usable, you can do better in must cases. MJ also contains a routing mechanism to redirect traffic to subsites that are developed only with the mobile user in mind. This is the route we took with DEC. The mobile version of the site is being driven by a sub-site housing PDA-formatted content making it a much better user experience for the WAP folks.
