Checking How Your Site Looks On A Phone
While many of us own cell phones, for some of us its still a luxury. Either that or we don’t have data plans that allow us to visit a web site. Also, different phones display a site differently so how do we check if our sites displays OK on a phone? This is one question some VA’s have been asking me to.
There are what are called emulators that will try to mimic the way a certain phone’s browser display a web site. Another way is to try to ‘trick’ the web site by changing your browser’s User Agent.
One really nice emulator for iPhone I found recently is TestiPhone.com. Type your web site or any web site you want to check in the ‘phone’s’ browser bar and hit enter.
If you’re using Firefox, you can also try the User Agent Switcher extension. It comes pre-installed with a few User Agents but if you want a web site to think you are using an iPhone or any other cell phone you have to program the user agent in which is a little of a pain because it’s not like you have that information readily. Good for you I did the PITB work for you – ok only a bit ;-). Here’s how.
After installing the extension, go to Tools >> User Agent Switcher >> Option >> Options. Click on User Agents, then Add… For iPhone, enter the information as such.
Description: iPhone
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
App Version: Version/3.0
Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
Click OK
To add Windows IE Mobile, I repeated the same steps, this time I entered:
Description: Windows Mobile
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile m.n)
Everything else is blank.
Now, whenever I want to view how a site might look on a phone, I’d go to Tools >> User Agent Switcher >> iPhone or Windows Mobile. Then refresh the site.
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Love this idea Lynette! Is there a way to check what it looks like on a Blackberry too?
Hey Christie, Uhm I think there are a few different user agents. You can check out this list. Keep in mind this is not an exact representation of how the site will work on a phone, it only tries to fool the web site that the site is a phone and not a computer so ultimately it may look OK on the browser but not on the phone, however it is a good way to do quick checks.