Expand your skills and marketability by learning to build web sites for mobile phones and other handheld devices. Study design principles, device adaptation, usability, standards and best practices for mobile web development. You will build a device adapted mobile web site. For web developers or programmers familiar with XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Prerequisites

Successful students are web developers or designers with proficiency in the following skills:

• HTML and/or XHTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• .NET, PHP, Java/JSP or other web programming language (desired but not required)

Introductory Tasks

Complete these tasks to familiarize yourself with the mobile ecosystem and prepare your technology environment for course assignments.

• Review the Glossary of Mobile Industry Terms.
• Install the recommended free software for mobile web development.
• Configure the web server to support MIME types for mobile markup.
• Keep sample mobile user-agents handy for emulating mobile browsers when developing and testing a mobile web site.

Beginning Lessons

These lessons provide a basic understand of the syntax, semantics and deployment of mobile web sites.

Getting Started

Review course syllabus and glossary of industry terms. Install and configure required free software. Tour popular mobile web sites in XHTML and WML. Choose a topic for the course project.

Mobile Markup Languages

Explore syntax of popular mobile markup languages, including WML, XHTML-MP and wireless CSS.

Mobile Web Design

Study design principles and best practices for creating usable mobile web sites. Evaluate and critique examples of great and poor mobile web design.

Content Adaptation (aka Device Adaptation)

Techniques for providing the best user experience possible within the limits of the mobile browser and device. Explore image scaling, transcoding, text truncation and graceful markup degradation. Learn how to optimize mobile markup for families of related devices.

Markup Optimization and Validation

How to generate syntactically correct and compressed mobile markup. Explore automated and manual validation techniques for syntax and usability.

Testing and Deploying a Mobile Web Site

How to test a mobile web site using Firefox, mobile browser emulators and devices. Study the importance of testing on actual mobile devices. Learn how to deploy a mobile version of an existing desktop web site and route browsers to the appropriate version.

Acquiring Mobile Traffic

Drive mobile traffic to a site using mobile SEO, keyword research, search engine submission, operator partnerships. Learn how to advertise your site on mobile devices.

Monetizing Mobile Traffic

How to integrate advertising into a mobile web site to monetize mobile traffic.

Analyzing Mobile Traffic

How to analyze mobile traffic patterns.

Advanced Lessons

These lessons provide expertise in developing a robust, adaptive mobile web experience that is a responsible member of the mobile ecosystem.

Optimizing for Advanced Mobile Browsers

Creating advanced site features for capable mobile web browsers, i.e. Opera Mobile, Pocket IE, Safari Mobile, etc.

Mobile Javascript and AJAX

Learn the levels of support for Javascript and AJAX in mobile browsers on featurephones and smartphones.

Mobile Development Frameworks

Explore frameworks for developing mobile web sites. Evaluate their usefulness and return on investment vs. producing hand-coded mobile web pages.

Playing Well in Mobile Ecosystems

Operators, transcoders and caching proxies, oh my!

Advocating for Rights of Mobile Developers and Mobile Content

How to protect the copyright and content integrity of a mobile web. How to protect your site against operator or search engine re-formatting. Where to advocate for your rights as a mobile web developer.