The Headache of Building a Beautiful Mobile Web Site

A while ago we were contacted by Yamaha who wanted us to build out a fully function WAP site featuring their Marine Division’s new product line for 2010.  This sounded like a great opportunity for Textopoly and after several rounds of designs we were ready to set it up and make it work.  If anyone has ever had the pleasure of building a site to make sure that it works in Internet Explorer 6, then they would understand what a headache it is to build for micro browsers.  First, let’s break down what WAP is – Wikipedia states that WAP is:

Wireless Application Protocol (commonly referred to as WAP) is an open international standard^[1] for application layer network communications in a wireless communication environment. Its main use is to enable access to the Mobile Web from a mobile phone or PDA.

What they are trying to say is:

WAP is how you access the internet on your phone.  A WAP browser (Micro Browser) is your phones internal browser.
– Evan

Originally this site was designed and built for iPhone users.  As an iPhone user myself, I know how beautiful a website and/or WAP site can look.  Being able to break out of the mold of either full sites which look tiny on the screen or a slimmed down/image free version of the site (think Amazon’s WAP site) was also a unique challenge that we took great pride in overcoming.  We created a site designed specifically for the iPhone, each page textured and rendered to look stunning on the portable computer.  As Utopian as we were becoming we realized that there was one slight drawback when developing for the iPhone – Blackberry, Motorola, Samsung, and many of the other handsets had errors that we didn’t expect.

Through testing on all major devices we realized that we had some major formatting issues.  Blackberry caused the page to reformat itself, because, well, the browser is buggy.  Blackberry defaults have style sheets turned off.  It also likes to break code, reformat pages, and destroy anything and everything in its wake.  It’s like the Terminator of browsers.  For being a ’smart-phone’ you would think they would have built a better browser.  The annoying part is their new phones are not much better.  Additionally, Motorola and Samsung phones would show the area that is supposed to be transparent in a PNG image, defeating the purpose of a PNG image.  All in all, these were some of the minor issues among many.

To boil down to a point, if you’re interested in viewing WAP sites, building WAP sites, or even thinking about WAP sites you pretty much have two handsets to think about – Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.  I say we as an industry give up on what it looks like on other/older phones.  It’s kind of like IE6, we should just stop supporting it and focus on the future instead of the legacy.  We’re on the cusp of a potential tidal wave of designer sites.  This is the best way to push ourselves as designers and developers.  By limiting us with older handsets, we limit our creativity and imagination.  Besides, people on older handsets aren’t looking and utilizing WAP sites anyway, they’re too busy playing Snake.  I loved that game.

We’re in the process of re-working the Yamaha WAP site, but to see the original design before it changes go check it out for yourself by having a link sent to you. Go to our homepage (www.textopoly.com) – enter in your phone number and presto you’ll have the site sent to you!