html - Redirect mobile devices to alternate version of my site

Question

We've got an alternate version of out website ready for mobile devices. The content we serve is different and it works well.

What is the best way to detect which version to serve. We don't have a list of all mobile devices so to use the user-agent header is tricky as we may miss something.

We thought about useing device screen width - but what happens if the mobile device doesnt support javascript. How do we sniff this ?

Answer 1

You could use a device description database (such as WURFL) which will recognise the client device from the request headers. You can then query that database to decide if the device can handle your site (e.g. support javascript, or is the screen big enough) before deciding whether to redirect them to a different site.

You don't mention your environment, but WURFL supplies APIs for Java and PHP, and maybe others as well. If there's no supplied API, you can still use WURFL, but you'll have to parse and process the XML data yourself.