I have contacted a couple of mobile vendors about creating a mobile website. These are not the same people who created our websites. Will someone have to do any re-coding for mobile or can the code be reused? I'm hoping it involves only designing the site with minimal new coding.
I would say it all yes probably. If you have are using a CMS does it allow for mobile versions of the pages or multiple template view for the content? The ticketing part of your site might need work depending on the structure of the pages. If you are using mobile website frameworks like JQueryMobile then I would think you would need a mobile template for your pages and to maybe rework the information that comes from the server for those pages.
We are going with a new website because there is too much in our ticketing path that would need to be recoded to handle mobile views of similar information. We will be slimmingdown the offerings on mobile devices to just single tickets as well.
If you would liek to talk more about what we are doing let me know.
Gloria, I would say it all depends on what your ticketing site is doing. For example if you are using ASP/PHP files to render some of your ticketing pages the format that they render might not be mobile friendly. An example of this could be an event calendar which looks great in a desktop browser but might look small and cramped in mobile browser.
Maybe if your ticketing site is designed in such a way that all you need to do is modify or have a second style sheet for mobile devices then there is the possibility for less recoding. In that scenario you could detect if it is a mobile browser and use the style sheet geared for mobile.
I know for us it would work out better going with a new site with slimmed down content and a slimmed down ticket path.
Jon