Blog, Greencode, Nerd, Nintendo Wii, Themes, WordPress

Optimizing Your Website for the Wii

I’ve optimized my blog (and thus my Greencode WordPress theme) for browsing on the Nintendo Wii. So if you read my blog on the Wii, it will look like this:

My website on the Wii

It was pretty easy, and you can do it too, by following these two simple steps:

1. Create a Wii-friendly stylesheet. This is similar to creating a mobile-friendly stylesheet, and it involves enlarging the text, removing superfluous crap, and just making your site easier to read from a distance. You can see the stylesheet I created here.

2. Serve the Wii stylesheet to Wii users. The user-agent string of the Wii will be something like Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en), so in PHP, you can accompish this like so:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Wii;") !== false){
[... wii stylesheet ...]
} else {
[... regular stylesheets ...]
}

And just for fun, I also added an “Optimized for the Nintendo Wii” watermark in the top-right corner and enabled the Wii stylesheet for anyone who adds “?wii=1” to the end of a URL. For example, here is the Wii-friendly version of this post.

Standard

7 comments on “Optimizing Your Website for the Wii

  1. Does a wii emulator exist so we can see what a site would like in a wii – yea i know it uses opera, but what other little things does it have enabled/disabled. Like besides flash what plugins are on the Wii?

  2. Janz: not that I’m aware of, but it appears that the Wii version of Opera differs only from the desktop version in its navigation tools. In the browsing I’ve done, mostly everything acts the same as it does on the desktop.

  3. This theme with the Wii formating is so great! Thanks for putting this together.

    Have you tried using the CSS modification with other themes for WordPress?

    Thanks Again,
    Steve

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