I had the opportunity to make a mobile site for Grand Targhee Ski Resort. The experience taught me not just about making site for mobile browsers, but about how our user experience of the web is changing. We expect to have information available to us in a friendly format almost anywhere!

I was prompted to make a mobile site after I had tried to access the regular Grand Targhee site from my phone as I was driving to work one day. I wanted to check how much snow we had to see whether it was worth turning around to go back and get my snowboard. After waiting a while for the regular Targhee site to load I gave up and just continued on to work. When I got to the hill, there was about a foot of light fluffy powder on the ground. I was so mad that I vowed Targhee would have a mobile version with the most valuable information on it within a week.

It turns out mobile sites are their own animals, I wrote Targhee’s mobile site without any javascript, and a very light version of valid xhtml + CSS. I paid extra attention to making the site as light and quick to load as possible, so even in the mountainous regions of the Tetons, one can still check Targhee’s powder scores!