In an earlier blog post on the iPhone and the iPhone SDK, I advocated for optimizing your college or university website for mobile devices.
Now there's some help on the way from MIT. Not only has MIT optimized their site for mobile devices - not just the iPhone - but they also plan to open source the mobile web code and make it available to other colleges early next year. I really love that this project was driven by a grassroots student movement - students wanted to be able to view the site on their cell phones. Here's a screenshot for their mobile site - which you can visit from your web-enabled phone at m.mit.edu:
With the source code released early next year, you could spend the spring semester adapting the code; the summer beta-testing; and launch your mobile web initiative by September 2009. Read more:
Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who want to use their iPhones to look at course syllabi or check the campus-shuttle schedule can now surf to a version of the MIT Web site designed especially for cellphones. And officials plan to let other colleges use the Mobile Web project software.
The goal of the project is to create MIT Web pages that load quickly and look good on all kinds of Web-capable cellphones, often referred to as smartphones. Most college Web sites are designed for big monitors and fast Internet connections, but those pages are often hard to navigate on smartphones. So MIT officials are now encouraging cellphone users to use the new mobile Web site, at m.mit.edu, when visiting the Web site from their phones.
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