Mobile Website Development With Branch

You can display a mobile version of your website to mobile devices using responsive design techniques.

Our approach

There are primarily two major ways to build a mobile website. 

  1. Build a separate website. For example, have mobile.website.com for mobile devices and www.website.com for desktop browsers.
  2. Use the same website for mobile devices but display the content for a page differently for the mobile browser.

We've chosen to follow the concept of responsive webdesign and go with #2. 

This means that instead of having to maintain a separate mobile site, you can simply display the same content for the same URL differently to a mobile browser. The major advantage is that it's easier to maintain.

Enabling Mobile Support

Mobile support is available on Pro version only. By default mobile support is disabled to save the small overhead of testing for a mobile device. To enable mobile support simply go to Site Manager -> Mobile and click the "enable" link in the red box that says that "Mobile Support is Disabled".

Mobile Website Support Dashboard

Mobile templates are not available unless mobile support is enabled.

The pieces that make this work

First off, in order to display content differently to a mobile device, the software has to detect that the browser is a mobile browser. This is done using WURFL data to detect a mobile device. 

Once it's been determined that a browser is a mobile browser and not a desktop browser you can display an alternate Mobile Template to that device.

You can also take it one step further and create Mobile Profiles to display content to specific mobile devices. For example you can create a profile to match iPhones and then use the Catch-All Mobile Profile to display content to all other mobile devices.

Exclusion Conditions can be used to treat certain mobile devices like a desktop browser.