Web Effectiveness Blog

A recent CMSWire article titled, “Content Managers Need To Address the Mobile Web,” got me thinking it was time for a post about how we’ve enabled content management for the mobile Web within SiteExecutive. In the current release – SiteExecutive 4.1 enhancement pack 4 – we provide a configuration for “media-dependent” style sheets (see below). This approach is based on the W3C CSS 2 standards, which work great for print and Braille, but not mobile devices.

Aside from the lack of support by device and mobile browser developers (notably the most popular mobile Web devices, such as the iPhone and Blackberry), the media-dependent approach can involve significant effort in terms of CSS development and testing.

With the over-riding theme of SiteExecutive being focused on making Web content management easy, and the growing use of mobile devices for surfing the Web – over 40 million active mobile Internet users in the US according to Nielsen – we’ll introduce a new approach for managing mobile content in March in SiteExecutive Enhancement Pack 5.

Instead of making you create a new style sheet, with Enhancement Pack 5 we’ll be introducing the concept of “Sibling” templates and enhanced detection of mobile browsers. Based on the best practices for developing mobile content, Sibling template creation should take less than 10 minutes – and best of all, will require no effort by content authors.

We’ll be releasing more information about our enhanced support for creating, managing and delivering mobile-friendly Web content in early March. Until then, if you’d like more information, click here.