Building Great Mobile Sites Quickly and Inexpensively

During the course of 2011, mobile-optimized sites have gone from being a rarity to becoming a standard part of what we do.

Initially, we used straightforward HTML5 and CSS3 for mobile sites. This approach is very flexible and readily supports full-custom visual designs.

Last fall, we began using jQuery Mobile, and we’re now using it for most of our new sites. We’ll be adding it to most of our SmartThemes in the near future.

jQuery Mobile takes a little getting used to, as it is a different way of building sites. But once you go through the short learning curve, it’s incredibly productive. You can create mobile sites with app-like behavior in just a couple hours, simply by writing straightforward, semantic HTML5 markup and adding some special HTML attributes. The jQuery Mobile engine transforms your code, using those attributes as triggers, into a polished mobile presentation.

If the fact that this is a JavaScript framework scares you, think again! You can build a jQuery Mobile site without writing a single line of JavaScript code.

And if styling a mobile site is a concern, you can let go of that worry too — a basic jQuery Mobile site does not require any custom CSS code at all! The framework provides it all, and there’s even a web-based ThemeRoller that lets you change the color palette and many other aspects of the visual presentation without writing any code.

We are grateful to the jQuery Mobile community for this outstanding framework, which makes our job so much easier and lets us deliver even more value to our clients.

To help spread the word, we’re offering a free webinar on building mobile sites with jQuery Mobile. It’s free, but you do need to register in advance.