A mobile website for West Virginia University in 19 days with the open-source MIT Mobile platform

August 31, 2009 |  by  |  Marketing Strategy, Mobile, More with Less, Technology, YouTube

Yep, you’ve read correctly. It’s not a typo.

Web Services professional technologist Dave Olsen managed to develop the mobile version of his institution’s website in 19 days thanks to a lot of hard work and Mobile MIT, the platform developed for its own use and made available earlier this year for free by MIT.

Launched today along with an iPhone application developed separately by a WVU student, the mobile version allows users to search the WVU directory, stream WVU radio station U92, browse a campus events calendar, get University news and sports updates and link to WVU’s You Tube channel.

You can check it out at http://m.wvu.edu or have a look below at the screen captions prepared by Dave.

Pretty cool for 19 days of work, don’t you think?

Dave just proved that it doesn’t take a lot of time and money to develop a useful mobile presence for an institution thanks to the good folks behind MIT Mobile. And, if you want to learn how he did, watch out for an upcoming webinar he will present soon for Higher Ed Experts.

Got a mobile website for your institution? Share its link in the comments below!

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8 Comments

  1. aaron
    8/31/2009 at 11:52 am

    I’m obviously missing it, but where do you download this open-source software?

  2. Andrew Careaga
    8/31/2009 at 12:54 pm

    Very impressive work. Congrats, Dave!

  3. Erik
    9/2/2009 at 1:20 pm

    Same here, I can’t find the platform source code anywhere. This looks like a very cool project.

  5. Karine Joly
    9/2/2009 at 3:20 pm

    Thanks for the link, Erik. You can also directly contact the MIT Mobile team at mobiweb@mit.edu

  6. Rex Whisman
    9/2/2009 at 5:32 pm

    Great to see WVU ahead of the curve. Sooner rather than later mobile websites will be common place. A great example outside of higher education is the mobile website for godaddy.com

  7. Paul Fairbanks
    9/3/2009 at 8:31 am

    I agree that every site will need a mobile version sooner than later. We are working on one. I was having trouble getting the WVU mobile site to load by default on my iphone. If I typed in the address it was fine. ESPN has a great mobile site for iphones (if you view the source code you can see where it redirects iphones to the mobile version). There is a great slideshow from MIT at http://www.slideshare.net/shubeta/developing-the-mit-mobile-web-presentation
    I love that the only sport on the top menu of the app if football, but I guess if a student does it, they don’t need to please everybody.

  8. Becky Peters
    9/26/2009 at 3:04 pm

    I am very interested in this open source offering. We are big fans of the MIT site. We have a mobile text site and an iPhone friendly site.

Trackbacks

  1. links for 2009-08-31 « innovations in higher education
  2. Higher Ed Websites Gone Mobile | collegewebeditor.com
  3. Going mobile at your institution soon? Follow “Mobile in Higher Ed,” a new blog by WVU Dave Olsen | collegewebeditor.com

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