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

August 31st, 2009 Karine Joly 11 Comments

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!

11 Responses

  1. aaron says:

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

  2. Very impressive work. Congrats, Dave!

  3. […] A mobile website for West Virginia University in 19 days with the open-source MIT Mobile platform (tags: mobile highered highedweb uwebd universities colleges mobilesite webdev webdesign trends) […]

  4. Erik says:

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

  5. Karine Joly says:

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

  6. Rex Whisman says:

    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. 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 says:

    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.

  9. […] I provide a few examples of mobile websites developed by higher ed institutions – including West Virginia University’s mobile website developed in 19 days by Dave Olsen – along with some traffic […]

  10. […] did a tour-de-force last summer by developing in 19 days WVU mobile website. Last year he used the MIT Mobile platform. He has kept modifying the platform ever since to make […]

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