Question Regular and mobile website development

[Potish]

I have a website developed using Webspeed. A high percentage of the site's visitors now come from mobile devices - primarily phones. I am in the process of developing a mobile version of the website and wanted to find out what's the best way to share speedscript between the regular and mobile webpages?

Most of the regular website code will be used on the mobile website for form processing and I don't want to just copy code and end up having to make updates twice every time new features or bug fixes are made.

 

[lee.bourne]

I don't know how complicated your pages are but you might find the best way of supporting 2 sites with one code base is through clever use of CSS.

 

[Cecil]

Personally I try and use AJAX calls for server side processing which returns JSON.

For example. I have both a Regular and Mobile Login Page which both call a common AJAX cgi-wrapper which handles all the database stuff which returns a JSON as a result. I have HTML tables dynamically generated from the JSON results (ProDataSet are very good for this).

I only have to maintain one set of server side code and then any other 3rd party (non-WebSpeed) web kiddy Dreamweaver fanboy developer using Javascript/jQuery can and maintain the client side code. Also it's flexible enough to also be adopted for simple Web Services.

Depending on the real estate size of existing website you might have to reduce the functionality for mobile for better user experience (UX). I have a stupid web form on one of my main maintenance pages which has about one hundred input fields and another 120+ readonly fields and this would totally not be practical to be reduced down into a mobile web interface.