I suspect this is an issue a lot of Power and Pro users are aware of, but possibly unconvinced about. The query is simple:

How do we make our customised smugmug sites compatible with mobile devices like android, iphone, blackberry and the many many others?

I don't have one myself, but a lot of my friends do, and so far their comments have been that they "can't really view the site very well" on their mobile device. This obviously causes great frustration. After weeks of perfecting a design for the web and different browsers, now it seems wasted on the ever growing number of mobile device users. So, a few questions.

1) Can a flash slideshow ever show up properly on mobile devices?

2) If so, can it ever be made to decrease in size, while still remaining a particular size in web browsers?

3) What about the custom header? Won't it appear massive on mobile devices?

4) What about the custom dropdown navigation bar that i'm sure a lot of people have implemented. It looks great in web browsers, but again, won't it look stretched and unmanageable on mobile devices?

5) More generally, how do we customise our design so that it is universally passable as a decent website on all mobile devices?

6) How do we see the way our site looks on different mobile devices without purchasing every single one on the market?

7) Finally, how come a lot of website seem to have one design for web browsers, and one far more basic one set up specifically for mobile devices. How can we edit mobile device design independently of web browser design?

I know these are all cosmetic issues, but after all, we don't want our hard work going to waste on an ever increasing amount of mobile internet users. Furthermore, this issue is only going to become ever more pertinent as time goes on and the majority switch to mobile devices (if it isn't already close to happening).

I'll take one of these questions.

A flash slideshow will never work on any Apple device since Apple is having a war with Adobe over Flash. And, even though it can work on the recent generation of Android devices, it does not work well.

What I have done on my site and many others too is to switch my custom homepage slideshow over to the new JFriend HTML5 Slideshow that does work on all modern mobile devices. In addition, it comes up almost 5x faster on desktop computers (no flash to load). You can see how to install it here.

And a few more answers:

Some aspects of your site design can be made to scale to fit the space on screen or to at least adjust themselves to be functional.

Drop-down menus that need mouse hover in order to work, don't work at all on most touch screens (they don't have mouse hover). You have to change your design to something works on a touch screen with no mouse.

Good mobile devices allow the user to scale the page up/down in order to do what they want to do. This allows people to zoom out to see what's on the page and zoom in to interact with specific content. You don't have to do anything to your site for that to work.

The simplest thing you can do test out your site is to load the Safari browser onto your computer, bring up your site in it and make the Safari window size such that the usable area inside the browser is around 960x480 and then see how your site works in that environment. This is not identical to a mobile device, but this is the iPhone screen size and most mobile browsers use the same webkit browser engine that Safari uses. You can at least start to see how your site works at this size. Beyond that, you'll need to find some friends who have modern smartphones and borrow them for a few minutes/hours to test things out. I own an Android phone (Motorola Droid) and my daughter has an iTouch (WiFi). My brother-in-law has an iPad. Between the three of those, I'm able to see pretty much how things work. In a pinch, you can even go to a phone store and try something on one of their demo phones/tablets. I've done that before too.

There are some phone simulators that can run on your computer, but I've not tried any of those. You can search on Google, find them and see if you want to try anything.

The ideal design for small screen, slow speed mobile is often different than full screen desktop. If one was really trying to optimize for both, you'd have a different design for each. That's why big sites like airlines have different designs for each. That is not something you're really able to do on Smugmug, though you can make some parts of the site adaptable.

Smugmug does offer a simplified mobile version, but I find it so limiting that I don't find it particularly useful and it can't be customized to have any of your own look/feel.

I have mobile compatible turned on so when I access my site through my iPhone I see a menu instead of my home page. If I were to create a QR code for my website would I just use the www. or would there be a way to send it directly to mobile?