abweb.design asks:

Just curious if anyone had a mobile device with web access and is willing to check the mobile version of our website. If you go to www.abwebsitedesign.com with any mobile browser, it should seamlessly redirect to the mobile version. Please let me know your thoughts.

My Thoughts
I don't have a mobile device with Web access, but when I need to test pages, I use Opera in small screen mode. To get into that open Opera, browse to the page, and then in the View menu, choose "Small screen".

The drawback here is that because Opera is not running on a mobile device, it won't automatically switch. But AbWeb has placed a link at the very top to switch to the mobile site. The mobile site is nice - clean and easy to follow. The only thing I don't really like is that it seems like most of the content is missing. But I suppose that's okay to assume that people wouldn't need all of it from their cellphone.

More Help with Designing Mobile Sites

• Use the Google Transcoder to simplify your pages
• You Already Write for Cell Phones
• Writing a PDA Friendly Web Site
• Write Web Pages for the iPhone
• Poll: Do you use a PDA or cell phone to browse the Web?

What do you think?
Do you have a cell phone or mobile device you can test this page in? What do you think of it? Even if you don't have a device, what do you think of the mobile pages in your standard browser? Let us know by posting in the comments or answering the post.

Earlier this week I talked about how to completely block printing with CSS. Then today I found this nifty tutorial on how to create a watermark on printed materials. It doesn't work too well in IE 6, but then again, what does? CSS for printing isn't perfect yet, but we're starting to be able to do fun things. Of course, Web pages are really intended to be viewed on the Web - not printed, but we're not arguing that right now, are we?

There are now a bunch of weblog systems that will help you manage your blogs both hosted and not. WordPress is one of the better known ones, along with Blogger and Movabletype. Many of these tools now include ways to write static pages that are not in the blog structure and other functions to allow you to manage your whole site with them. But are they content management tools the same way a system like Drupal or TeamSite is? These tools have a large number of other tools included like user management, different page types and styles, and much more. What do you think, is WordPress a CMS?

The W3C has decided to take a look at Web video with the aim of making it a first class citizen. This is good news, as up until now, video (and it's companion, audio) have been difficult to place on Web pages, and have caused problems like slow downloads and difficult compatibility. I put up a video the other day, and it streamed great on my computer, but on my brother's Linux box, he had to download the whole thing before it would even play. And he couldn't even download the first version of the video that I made. So, if you've had trouble adding video to your Web pages, you're not the only one. Maybe someday we won't be forced to use the deprecated embed tag, and when we do use the object tag our videos will play.