Designing For The Mobile Web

Originally posted January 19, 2009

Developing your web site for mobile devices can be confusing.  What screen size should you optimize for? What device is the most popular?  What content do you keep in, what do you remove?  There are many decisions to make, but allow me to make one suggestion. Save yourself some heartache and instead of using a separate domain such as a .mobi version, use a subdomain such as m.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/mobile. Using a subdomain keeps your brand strong, reduces customer confusion and better optimizes your site for search engines.

Additional Resources:

Mobile Plugins for WordPress – easily make your site viewable on mobile devices.Setting up a Google Analytics filter to track mobile visitors to your site
Designing for the Mobile Web

January 22, 2009 1 Comment

  • mobiledesign

    ah, no. What you state is only from someone who is too stubborn for change.

    What you are stating is that the user MUST waste time and money entering in 4 differernt URLs (wasting users money and time) for them to access a website via mobile. Yes, it would be great IF ALL companies use one URL standard accessing mobile websites.

    Let's use Twitter, which is a common website that most people use. You have a mobile phone. You want to access the mobile website. Choose the URL:

    http://www.twitter.com/m
    http://www.twitter.com/mobile
    http://m.twitter.com
    http://mobile.twitter.com

    OR just enter one:
    http://www.twitter.mobi

    Surely a company could use php to redirect mobile devices to the mobile site, but NOT ALL companies have such employees to do this. And if you did indeed have such employees, they could not update the php file which redirects mobile devices to the mobile site as there are too many to remember. To have someone update such file on a daily basis to keep up with mobile devices would be too expensive.

    I wait for your reply.