Its not that big of a site or that complex to rule out a flexible solution. One I've found and like ishttp://www.getskeleton.com/ the Skeleton css framework. That way you can serve the same page to everybody and avoid a lot of hassles. There are also some mobile sites in the marketplace that will serve a simple version of the site to mobile devices.

That way they can have their cheese on the cracker.

steve

I am not sure I understand how this would help. If we had started off from scratch, and built a site using this skeleton, I can see how it would be extensible. But the corp site is already built. I wouldn't want to be redoing the existing site, so I'm not sure what the skeleton would do for me, except provide a starting framework for our new mobile site. But it would still mean I'd be building a whole site from scratch, (or at least pulling as many elements as I can from Concerete5).

Is it feasible to rebuild the entire site using this skeleton and have it mirror all the functionality of the main corp site? That seems like longer than 2 weeks.


And they do want essentially all the features on the corp site to be on the mobile site (so, not just a site "lite").

Yes. Its just a matter of relative sizes, max-width and floats. Way less than 2 weeks of time.

Are you saying that I first duplicate the entire website to a new location, retaining all working widgets that pull content (news items, images from file manager, etc.), etc. then go in and strip out the existing CSS, and install new CSS, so I now have a second site that's mobile?

The part that concerns me is ensuring I somehow maintain all the widgets in working order.

Basically, yes. but all the css doesn’t need to go. just convert the fixed width to variable (i.e. instead of width: 876px; make it :max-width: 876px;) and disable the floats at smaller sizes.

steve

[QUOTE]Way less than 2 weeks of time.[/QUOTE]
Can I quote you on that in tomorrow's meeting? Do you have a money back guarantee? :D

No problem.

I expect I am going to need a fair bit of help to do this. For example, I'm not even sure how I would go about doing step 1: duplicating the site to a new location.

[EDIT: a little reading reveals that it *is* merely a matter of copying all the files to a new location to play. And apparently IT is "all up in dat". So, cross item 1 off my list...]

Naturally, Creative wants to completely redo the design, to put less content on the pages and adding features such as Search.

We're trying to make a copy of the corp website (download was at 3400 files and counting - that's pretty much one file for every HTML character in our site.... :-O )

I'm debating on whether it would be faster to take the dupe site as-is and start trying to modify existing pages to match the new arrangement, or whether I should build the new site to the design, then drop in content modules.