What is the best way to build a Mobile Site?

[Ben-HPB]

I am looking into building a mobile version for my website, knowing that Google Likes Google should I stick with using their mobile building tool or build something from scratch in Dreamweaver?

How to optimize for Google Mobile?

Thx

[JarnoNijzing]

Dear William,

my advise. Don't just build a mobile website. Build it for internet and mobile compatible.

Some of our websites were build just for the web and i must say that iPhone's render the pages perfectly but windows phone tend not to. Still most mobile phones nowadays use Android or Apple OS. Since both of them are able to render websites like normal you don't have to adept to mobile devices.

Our websites are even reader compatible. When you open a page in you mobile browser there appear a button that says: reader. Press it and voila the page opens in your favourite reader.

Hope this helps

[Highland]

Google has a mobile bot. Google webmaster discussed the issue and that can be summed up as "just treat our bots like the end user".

My tips

1. DON'T JUST FILTER FOR WEBKIT. It's a pet peeve of mine. Look at the full user-agent. It's not that hard. There are other mobile browsers out there too...
2. Template your site (Smarty, etc), with the content as the "meat". Then you can show a stripped-down version easily.
3. It doesn't matter what you use to build the mobile site, just be sure to test it in a real mobile phone. Some of the emulators don't give you an accurate idea of it it will work in your phone or not
4. Desktop Safari is NOT the same thing as iOS Safari. Learned that the hard way.
5. Remember, you're now dealing with a TOUCH environment. Make sure your JS is geared towards that distinction.

[AlanMosley]

build one site for both browser and mobile.

you can use the viewport meta tag and css, to detect the screen size and different css will take over.

@media only screen and (max-width: 850px)
{
      csss for mobile
}

This has been recomeneded by Bing as they found that sites made just for mobiles do not rank or generate much traffic.

I have made a few pages like this for testing.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues

Here is what bing had to say on the subject
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/03/07/building-websites-optimized-for-all-platforms-desktop-mobile-etc.aspx