Whether your just starting out, or been running for ages, you will most likely need some sort of software built for your site that you either don't have the time or skills to build it in house. At times like these you can get in a professional company or you can outsource the project using a site like freelancer.com

Over time, we outsourced a good number of projects using freelancer.com. You don't have to be a technical specifier nor a great negotiator to use sites like these to get good value solution built to your own requirements.

We generally start by searching through some of the currently listings for projects with similar solutions to see what technologies and platforms they are using to create the solution and help us to pick the ideal solution to our project.

26th May 2010 - CouponMeUp.com today announced a new coupon search app which is available in the iTunes store from today, for FREE

We are extremely excited to be able to bring the next phase of our mobile platform online, said the CouponMeUp.com Product Manager. Following on the smashing success of our webapp released a few weeks ago, we have created an iPhone app specifically to allow you to search our coupons on your iPhone where ever you are. Searching a mobile device can be tedious at the best of times, involving a great deal of zooming and panning around on any traditional website that is not designed specifically for mobile use, even on our webapp, your not getting access to all the features we have been able to create in our app. It is easy to use and view on the device and is super lean to reduce downloaded data charges, he explained.

To try the service, go to the App Store on your iPhone or iPod Touch and search for couponmeup. Now with coupons from over 6,000 stores, you'll be able to find discounts on almost anything you could want.

http://www.couponmeup.com

Being an avid iPhone user, and receiving a few requests for our site to support a mobile format, making a Coupon Search Webapp for the iPhone seemed like a no brainer!

Specification:
First we researched what was possible in a webapp and that is basically anything that can be rendered as a small web page in safari browser. Armed with this information we sat down and decided what we needed the webapp to do.

We decided that we needed the search form functionality, the search results and coupon display. It was also thought to be a great idea to redirect anyone using an iphone or ipod to be redirected to the iphone version of the site.

Implementation:
First cab off the rank was the redirect. After some research, javascript supports a userAgent matching function:

<script language=javascript>
<!--
if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) ||
(navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)))
{
location.href='http://www.couponmeup.com/iphone/';
}
-->
</script>

We used this code to redirect the user to an alternative homepage which is designed specifically for the small screen.

Beyond our homepage, most of our site is dynamic and generated using PERL scripts and mysql databases. To lower the overhead of implementing basically a new site, we used some PERL code to detect the device the user is using and change the template which is displayed for the user.

my $userAgent = $ENV{"HTTP_USER_AGENT"};
if (($userAgent =~ m/iPhone/i)||($userAgent =~ m/iPod/i)||($iphone eq '1')) {

We also added a variable that can be specified on the command line to get the system to display an iPhone template when viewed in a normal browser which helped a lot in testing.

We then created templates for all of the required pages using the same variables that are available in our full templates and we are able to maintain a single set of code with two templates. This also easily allows us to create another version of the site for say Blackberry at a later date with minimal work.

We have now created a framework for mobile coupon browsing that should be easy to work with and expandable to a range of devices.

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