Mobile version of your Web site. What should I choose?

[kgun]

1. Background.

Shopping at your fingertips is now possible with a mobile platform any place in the world where there is wireless access to the internet. More and more companies make a mobile version of their internet site. In its simplest form all you may need is to make your site mobile friendly. (http://www.ericewe.com/online-marketing/six-easy-ways-to-make-your-website-mobile-friendly/)

Related link: W3C Mobile Web Initiative (http://www.w3.org/Mobile/).

2. mobile.site.com or site.mobi or ...

One solution to make your site mobile friendly is of course to use one or more CSS style sheets made seamlessly for different mobile platforms. Other solutions that more and more companies seem to prefer is to make a mobile sub site mobile.site.com with its own markup, content and code with a link on the main site. The file extension .mob is a Top Level Domain (TLD) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mobi) in the Domain Name System of the internet. I have no information that a mobile version of your site site.mobi is more popular than a "mobile" subsite. So what should we choose when we build a mobile version of our web site?

3. Other recent SitePoint forum threads.


One thing that they seem to be conflating is mobile and mobile phone. When I talk about a 'mobile site', it's a site geared to mobile phones, and particularly in terms of the small screen and the difficulty of using such a device. They several times showed iPads suggesting that they count them as mobile devices, whereas the size and resolution of them is closer to that of a desktop than a mobile.

Mobile website (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?815873-mobile-website)

jQuery Mobile (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?815903-jQuery-Mobile)

[williamc]

Look into html5boilerplate ( http://html5boilerplate.com/ )

[holyhttp]

Designing a web site for mobile device has to take into consideration both the size, the capabilities but also the context in which the user is accessing your web site. Although the iPad screen size is very close to the desktop screen sizes one has to classified it as a mobile device because it can be used on the go to access information just as you would with smartphones.

As far as choosing a different domain for the mobile version of your site, I for one prefer to keep all in the same domain. You can just create sub-directories for the mobile content and serve different content for the same URL to different devices (desktop, tablet, smartphone).

Given the context in which mobile devices users may access your site (in a hurry) content for those mobile devices should be more succinct to avoid carelessly eating away the end user's data plan but also limit the amount of scrolling.

[weegillis]

A browser based web ported to mobile has some drawbacks that a custom mobile site won't have--chiefly that a custom site can be designed with screen gestures and other touch screen exclusive UI behaviors. Just a thought.

[Sky Captain]

I'm thinking about mobile more and more... aren't there wordpress themes that can automatically display a blog's contents differently depending on mobile vs pc?

Actually, since most of my blogs already have cool themes that I don't want to change, I may experiment with mobile plugins. Here's a couple I found quickly.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

[kgun]

I know those WP plugins and use wptouch.

It is beyond those plugins and http://www.modernizr.com/

[weegillis]

When we think of the numbers, and how non-PC devices will soon overtake conventional PC's, it doesn't seem like an option anymore. Either we build to both user bases, or lose the lesser supported half. It's not just skin, but API support expectations that differ among the two user communities, as well. Building for mobile from the ground up is imho the best for those users who can access it. Pool the content for consistency and serve out exclusively to each user base.

Add: Of course none of the above has anything to do with OP. That would involve a comparison of whether a sub-domain can/will rank as well or better than a top level domain. As usage increases, it might be simpler for users to think in terms of .com and .mob assuming the domain name is the same. If they become creatures of habit, .mob (.mobi?) would become the natural pattern. The search engines will undoubtedly have this all sorted out in one form or another, by now, considering the numbers we are already seeing.

[kgun]

And for general web development, note this

Drupal 7 Mobile Web Development Beginner’s Guide (http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-7-with-mobile-tablet-devices-web-development-beginners-guide/book)

forthcoming book.

[CindyC]

However if you have a really big shop or your company is huge and offers lots of different services it is better to develop a mobile app that will allow 24/7 access to your services.

However the guide you suggested is a very interesting, I have taken several ideas from there.
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