WAP Site Creation Tutorial

1. Download a PC WAP Emulator or Software Development Kit
This will let you to preview your Wireless Markup Language (WML) files on your locally on your computer. This is a faster and cheaper way to learn WML than using a real mobile phone. IMPORTANT! - you should test you application completly on real devices before launching it commercially. The browsers in WAP Phones will often read the content slightly differently. It's like the good old days of the Internet when the same pages displayed on IE and Netscape looked different. You develop the majority of the WAP application and back end using an emulator or SDK and then fine tune the user interface on a selection of real devices.

2. Creation of a WML file.
WML is an XML language and is not as simple as writing HTML. If your code is not syntactically correct the WAP gateway will not compile the file for transmission over the air to the phone and the user will get an error message. Check out our WML Guide for the correct syntax to all WML tags.

3. Uploading your WML file to your webserver
This is done in exactly the same way as uploading HTML files via FTP. If you don't have webspace there are several "Geocities" style free hosting companies and professional firms listed in our Hosting pages. All webservers should be capable of hosting WAP Content if the Mime Types are configured.

4. Access your content
Enter your URL eg http://www.yourdomain.com/index.wml into your PC WAP Emulator or real WAP Phone.

5. Or do it the really easy way!
Alternatively if you don't have web space available or don't want to get your hands dirty coding you can use one of the many free web based WAP Site builders. These sites allow you to define the contents of your WAP Site in a user friendly web interface. Check them out on our Free Hosting page.