Some people might see mobile web sites as a novelty, but they are becoming increasingly more essential. Smartphones continue their assault on the mobile customer as they have entered the lower price points. The day is quickly approaching where the majority of phones will have a full featured web browser. With instant access to the full internet in your pocket, a mobile site is more likely the first choice.
Even with a full featured browser, physical size limitations demand a custom interface. Navigating a desktop site with your finger instead of a mouse is possible(and works quite well). The main issue comes from the need for speed. A mobile site can greatly benefit the user experience by decreasing page load times, simplifying navigation menus, and displaying media in an optimized format.
We recently began using WPtouch for our mobile site and it has performed quite well. The pages load much faster over Edge/3G, the navigation is easily performed with your finger, and the images are resized to fit the smaller screen. However, we would like to take it to another level and that is why we have begun developing a custom system.
A review of our web site traffic shows that over 10% comes from an Android device. This is obviously slanted since we report on Android news, but it shows how significant it can be. Once our mobile site is redesigned and we release an update to our news widget, I think the mobile traffic could account for 25% of the site.
Example Mobile Sites
In order to design a good mobile site, it is important to review what others have already done. This is a good way to play around with different ideas and look for improvements that can be made. I did a little search and came up with five mobile sites to look at.
Geek Squad Mobile Site
Geek Squad
http://m.geeksquad.com/
About: Geek Squad is the computer repair service offered from Best Buy. Their mobile site allows you to review services offered, check the status of a repair, locate a store, and contact them. I’ve never used their service, but I worked for CompUSA many years ago. When customers checked their PCs in for repair, some would call several times a day to check the status. Allowing customers to view the repair status from their phones is a huge benefit.
I like:
- Large buttons for menu navigation
- Good use of jQuery for animations and to reduce entire page reloads
- Call Us button launches the phone dialer
- Search located at top
Needs improvement:
- Lacking features of full site – blog, promotions, and self-help tools
- iPhone beta branding – site should just be HTML compliant for all smartphone browsers
College Humor Mobile Site
http://wap.collegehumor.com/
About: College Humor is a comedy site that offers content geared towards the university aged demographic. Their desktop site is media intensive with many original videos.
I like:
- Good backlog of videos in a mobile format
- Images and videos are formatted for mobile screen size
- Simple design – fast load time
Needs improvement:
- Navigation menu is at the bottom of the page
- They offer a custom iPhone site, but nothing for Android
- No Search option
The Onion Mobile Site
The Onion
http://mobile.theonion.com/
About: The Onion is my favorite, fake news network. Their site has many features forms of media including articles, video, radio, and a store.
I like:
- Good use of space – many categories fit in a small space
- Radio clips that work with the Android player
- Images formatted to fit the mobile screen
Needs improvement:
- No search feature
- News articles lack paragraph structure – hard to read
- Navigation menu at the bottom of the page
- Lacks much of the content found on the desktop site
- Missing videos
Volkswagen Mobile Site
Volkswagen
http://www.vw.com/mobile/iphone/
About: Volkswagen is an automobile company based out of Germany. Their mobile site allows you to get information about their current lineup of vehicles, locate a dealer, and call for emergency help.
I like:
- Call Emergency Assistance launches the dialer
- Find a Dealer page has large numerical buttons for easy touch input
- Large buttons on Our Cars listing
- Nice full screen image gallery with touch controls
Needs improvement:
- Take iPhone out of the URL
- Image gallery needs to be reloaded in landscape mode to see full screen images
- Weird formatting issues – car details page does not load correct in landscape mode
A List Apart Mobile Site
A List Apart
http://m.alistapart.com/
About: A List Apart is an online magazine for people who make websites. Topics cover content, culture, and design. Updates are published twice a month.
I like:
- Simple design – quick load times
- Nice authors detail page
- Top level navigation bar
- Excellent formatting – articles are easy to read
Needs improvement:
- No search option
- Weird formatting issues – images squish text in landscape view
As you can see from the examples, each site is using a different URL structure. Does this bother you and would you like to see everyone move to a similar standard? Our mobile site detects your browser agent and serves the appropriate site, but you can toggle between the full and mobile versions. Vote below and let us know which format you prefer if any.
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Taylor Wimberly
Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He loves playing with all kinds of gadgets, but most importantly cell phones. His other hobbies include cooking (BBQ hero!), politics, football, and watching every MMA event possible.
11 Comments
The appeal of being able to view ‘full’ websites on your phone soon wears thin and I find myself cursing sites that don’t have a decent mobile version.
Sometimes you just want a site to load quickly and with no nonsense, I think the delivery of advertising on these sites might be quite the sticking point for some companies as from what I’ve seen of mobile sites thus far they’re mainly devoid of any ads… which is quite appealing to me as a consumer, but probably less appealing when considering up to10% of your audience is potentially losing you money.
Anyway, here are a few notable mobile versions that I always use:
Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk – Wow I love the amazon mobile version, the complete mobile redesign is slick and functional. The search results are loaded in batches and adding an additional 10 results to the page doesn’t require a full page refresh or a change of page. It’s deffinately been shaped up for people who know what they want, just browsing can be a little hard, but then the same could be said of a lot of shopping sites in general.
m.digg.com – Awesome if, like me, you just use digg to check out the top 10 in the past 24 hours. Otherwise a bit restrictive. Also the comment section seems to ‘break’ quite a lot, loading the same 5 comments every time… although that could well be digg commenters…
m.Kotaku.com / m.gizmodo.com – Probably the mobile site I like the least. The stories are broken into sometimes as many as 20 pages, sure there’s a ‘view whole article’ option which I use instead but that means loading the same page twice, and therefore having to backout of a page twice. I know that seems like the ultimate in being lazy, but it can break the flow of quickly browsing. Also there are repeatedly problems with articles being blank when you click on them, and comments are handled woefully.
i.joystiq.com – Is the opposite of Kotaku’s mobile site, big (easy to click with my meat slab thumbs) links, a comment section that loads on the existing page and it manages to work 99% of the time. The only major downside is that all the links to previous joystiq articles take you to the regular version of the site.
Those are just a few worth checking out, sorry for hi-jacking the post!
Hey, also have a look at m.espn.com. They did quite a nice job with their mobile site, and it works well on Android.
I’d mention the Android websites that has gone mobile:
http://www.androidandme.com
http://www.googleandblog.com
http://www.androidforums.com
http://www.androidtapp.com
All do it by detecting browser, I like that option better and like the “m.site.com” secular.
The collegehumor mobile site sucks. I would much rather use the “real web browser” on my phone to view collegehumor but everytime I click on something I get redirected to the wap site. It is a waste of time and half of the content from the normal site does not make it to the mobile site. The menshealth mobile site also sucks.
AndroidTapp… I strongly disagree, I greatly appreciate KNOWING FOR SURE that I am viewing the mobile site, a m.site.com url gives me this awareness & it gives me a choice… for the android sites u listed perhaps it’s ok 2 auto-detect & go2 mobile site, but for established sites which have been around longer than android, I want 2 know and 2 b given a choice on yeah or nay 2 use the mobile site cuz the mobile sites often do not give me the functionality I need. For example amazon’s mobile site is inadequate for accessing my amazon seller acct but ok for the reg amazon site.
i like them all, all in all a nice post. i am not very particular about mobile sites url.
I’m sure mobile phones should be not simple mobile gadgets but complete, independent masterpieces!
Thanks for the great feedback on the site.
When http://m.geeksquad.com was developed we did focus on iPhone but we didn’t lose site that there are other Smartphone browsers that we needed to support .
You’ll see the beta title get dropped soon but we’ll still work to improve the experience for all mobile users.
Tools and blog support will be on the way soon. We recently re-launched our blog (http://www.geeksquad.com/intelligence ) and a mobile friendly version will be available in the near future.
Cheers!
NEED MOBAIL DIALER
Mobile phone is excellent example of technological advancement in communication. It has become a very essential resource of our daily life. Without mobile phones no one can imagine their life to stay in touch with their relatives or friends who are out of reach because it’s not possible to meet them personally every time. Availability of so many brands of phone makes it easy & possible.
College humor site sucks, I agree with kyle. The only thing you can view are videos and girl pics, no articles or regular pics. How can I entertain myself at work with only videos?