This morning John one of our designers pointed out that when he tried to call the office by using the telephone number posted on our web page the call immediately failed. It turns out that if we had formatted the phone number as +44 1706 822 888 it would work but we wanted to have it visually formatted as +44 (0) 1706 822 888 which is not recognised by the likes of iPhone or other smart phones.
After some research and fiddling it turns out that the solutions to this problem is quite simple. By using the ‘a’ tag you can add a phone number to your website, keep the format and still make it accessible to smart phones.
Instead of just placing the number on the page you should use the ‘a’ tag and format it like this.
<a href="tel:+44 1706 822888">+44 (0) 1706 822 888</a>
This way the smart phone uses the value of +44 1706 822 888 to make the call whilst still displaying the number on screen in the format of +44 (0) 1706 822 888.
