More on optimizing a site for mobile devices

As I've mentioned previously, my One Pagers site is optimized for mobile devices. While observing the shopping public I've become aware of how important search engines and mobile phones have become for consumers. If I'm to draw clients to my services One Pager sites must have utility as well as be viewable. Along with resizing fonts and images displayed telephone numbers must be usable. I've mentioned using mobile tools to switch themes when a site is accessed via a mobile device. Mobile tools has an add-on module wurfl, that along with a PHP API wurfl-php, detects device capabilities. There were some minor bugs in the module and the configuration is not particularly simple but it does work (at least on my Samsung anyway). The API utilizes a very large xml file that is constantly being added to. The file defines the capabilities for all devices known to the maintainers of this file. My host site has the capacity for installing it but my development server times out. Consequently I'm using a much abbreviated version just so that I can use it with Firefox's User Agent tool.

The business sites on One Pagers have the option of using an image for a letterhead. I had tried using the thumbnails generated by the file upload widget but they are too small. So, I've enabled Imagecache and created a preset action that scales the image to 25%x25%. The unfortunate part of this method is that I needed to assign the action to the teaser. I don't really want this image as part of my teasers but I can live with it for now. As far as images that are embedded in any text fields I've had to rely on CSS to set the size for any image found within a particular class of paragraph. So now I have a mobile device theme that both resizes images and makes telephone numbers available for the device to dial.