Easy steps to creating an iPhone webapp for site promotion

iPhone webapps are an excellent way to create inbound links. How you say? Simply create your webapp and submit it to the dozens of sites that feature webapps around the internet, including apple.com

Not only will your webapp give mobile users a better web experience and keep them coming back, but it will also build your page rank with a little promotion.

Let’s see how we did it.

Specification:
Firstly we checked out what was possible in an iphone webapp and that is pretty much anything that can be rendered as a small web site in the safari browser. Armed with our new found information our team sat down and decided what we needed our webapp to do.

It was decided we would need the search form , search results and coupon display pages. The team decided it would also be a good idea to redirect any user on an iPod or iPhone to the iPhone version of the site.

Implementation:
We started by researching the redirect based on which platform the user was browsing our site from. After some research we found that javascript supports a userAgent matching function:

We then placed this code into our homepage and redirected the users on iPhones and iPods to an alternative homepage
which is designed specifically for the small screen.

All of the pages inside our site except for the homepage are dynamically generated using PERL scripts and MYSQL databases. So to implement the webapp skin for the site without creating a while new site, we used some PERL code to detect the device the user is visiting our site from and change the template which is displayed to the user to be an iphone specific one.

my $userAgent = $ENV{“HTTP_USER_AGENT”};
if (($userAgent =~ m/iPhone/i)||($userAgent =~ m/iPod/i)||($iphone eq ‘1’))

The team also added a url variable that can be specified on the command line or via an URL parameter to force the system to display the iPhone template when viewed in a normal browser which helped a lot in testing the application.

Our designer then created all the templates for the required pages using the same variables and urls that are available in our full website’s templates and we are now able to maintain a single set of code with two templates. This also easily
allows us to create yet another version of the site for say Blackberry down the track with minimal work.

Now that the framework for mobile coupon browsing application is in place, it should be easy to work with and expand to a range of devices. Now that your iPhone webapp is finished, you can go and submit it to Apple and the other webapp sites!

Want to see the end result? Visit CouponMeUp.com with your iPhone.

This is a guest post by the Team at CouponMeUp , you can follow them on twitter @couponmeup