Easy mobile website template options

Question

What is a good easy mobile website solution for creating mobile sites? I am creating a mobile site and would like to find a good solution that I can use again for future projects.

I found several:

• JQuery Mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/)
• HTML5 Boilerplate Mobile (http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile)
• Skeleton (http://www.getskeleton.com/)

Although it seems that jQuery Mobile is taking advantage, it seems like a huge payload for every mobile user. HTML5 Boilerplate Mobile looks like a good alternative since I used HTML5BP for past projects.

The skeleton seems the easiest solution, but I'm concerned about its possible lack of support in the future. I don’t know enough about this, maybe someone can shed some light?

Answer 1

Stick to jQuery Mobile and you are mistaken in believing that it has a huge "payload." It is implemented using unobtrusive JavaScript. Marking the source is very light and simple.

Answer 2

You need to ask yourself what exactly you are looking for:

• Are you looking for CSS frameworks without JS, with some JS or a full CSS / JS hybrid map?
• Are you looking for an infrastructure that supports both the desktop and the mobile phone or something exclusively mobile-oriented?

Some options to consider, depending on what you are looking for:

• Twitter Bootstrap and the Zurb Foundation are the two most popular CSS framework options, and some of them with some JSs work fine with modern browsers, but may not be available if you still need to support IE8.
• If you don't need JS features and want to have the maximum footprint while supporting IE6 +, you can try your own Cascade Framework Light (it's just 2Kb).
• If you want to use only CSS frameworks oriented exclusively to mobile devices, you can try something like Clank .
• If you are looking for a complete hybrid CSS / JS framework, you might need to look at something like the Ionic or Angular Mobile UI .

Each of these structures is so different from architecture and focus. Whichever of them (or any other of those that I did not mention here) works best, because you really depend on your needs.