Can you design for both: desktop and PDA?

Methods to have your site available for all devices

[picophd]

Greetings,

Can anyone either give me guidelines, or links to good tutorials, about the best practices when designing a website, which the web designer would like to make available for visitors using cellulars, PDAs, and the likes, besides the regular desktop and latop users?

To give details about specifics that I'd really like to know:

Is it true that the most common resolution for these devices today is 176x208?

What is the most common connection speed at which these devices connect today? Are they charged per minute? So is it favorable to allow those visitors to download the articles, for instance, to read them offline?

Is there a way to automatically detect that a visitor is using such a device, and automatically direct that visitor to a separate part of your website, like example.com/palm? Or is this too much wasted work for the server, since the great majority will be on desktop and the likes? So it's better to just let visitors know about your /palm section and that's it?

Are there any CSS tips related to designing this section of one's website? For instance, should font sizes be strictly in em's? And width should always be a percentage? Etc.

Thanks for anyone taking the time to help and give tips.

[bill]

I'm not sure about PDAs, but my mobile phone has a 2.4 inch (320 x 240) screen that shows 262,144 colors; QVGA; TFT. I've found that the absolute best sites are the tableless CSS sites. If the page author has done a proper job of arranging the source of the document, then I am only limited by the size of the page. If you externalize any scripts and have valid code, I've had good luck viewing sites on my mobile.

I'm assuming PDA browsers do a lot better with CSS and the like. My phone's browser is a bit anemic in that area, but keep in mind that there are other mobile devices that can benefit simply from clean code and tableless design.

[freeflight2]

like I mentioned somewhere else in an other post: the way to go is to serve extremely simply pages to PDA users - check for user agent, then use a very basic template to serve title, content, navigation on the bottom - it's all about speed and have the device render everything on it's own and not to waste CPU time on tables etc.

[picophd]

How do you check for user agent? Using JavaScript? Do modern PDA's and WAP phones support JS?

[freeflight2]

I have my PHP app check it and then switch to a different template, or do something like this: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Jon_King]

One way to check your PDA view is with Opera's

View>Small Screen

option.

[picophd]

Thank you very much, freeflight!

Jon_king, thank you too, I didn't know about that function in Opera. That should definitely come in handy. Do you know how accurate it is, though? Does it really emulate PDAs and WAP phones? I mean do PDAs really take off some of the styles in pages this way? Have you ever compared what Opera shows with this function to what actually shows on a PDA?