“Just Visit m.mysite.com From Your Mobile Browser”

Are you losing potential mobile users?

A group makes a mobile site or app. When making the desktop site to promote the mobile service, they say something like:

Use your phone and visit: m.google.com/reader

That's a direct quote from the Google site promoting their mobile services. I copied the source code, not just the text.

Usually this emphasized text is also underlined. This is true on the actual Google page with their CSS applied. It looks like a link. That's fine, right? It's a link?

That's the problem. It's not a link.

I thought, "I want to find the mobile version of my favorite service. I will search for that link from the search tool on my mobile." The Google search results were terrific, leading me right to the page where I would find the information I needed. But the link didn't work!

I had to look at the URL, remember it, and then type it in. Bad plan. Most smart phones' browsers will render desktop web pages. And search results will typically return desktop web pages.

Opera also did this last week when they launched Opera Mini 5 beta. I mentioned it on Twitter; they have fixed the problem. Kudos to Opera for monitoring social media. But shame on Opera for not thinking that some people might visit their desktop site from a mobile phone, and make it a link in the first place.

Your simple takeaway: when telling customers how to find your mobile content via a URL, make the URL also a link.

This includes you, Google.

Funny that such a simple rule is not followed. Is it laziness? Carelessness?

I think it’s different teams working on different products, and the desktop team isn’t thinking through all the use cases of their promotional material.

Just had the opposite case happen – client did NOT want the URL to the desktop to be clickable, b/c it was too hard to navigate with a mobile browser. Seems in either case though, the rule should be it’s always a link.

What is interesting is that you can use the google mobile site list to send yourself a text with the link in it. See http://www.google.com/mobile/products/more.html#p=default

Good point – though best-case for mobile views produced by Mobify is “m.site.com”, we’re all about device detection. If there is enough interest, we could release our JavaScript API as a managed service for anyone to use (so desktop users can get mobile websites automatically).

The whole issue of mobile vs. regular sites and how to switch between them seems messed up on a lot of sites. In addition to the problem you cite here, there are the sites that automatically detect you’re on a mobile device and try to be helpful by serving you that version of the site, but often they don’t realize I’m on an iPhone or something that can render the full site better and so I want the option of switching back. Some sites don’t allow you to switch back, or when they do they mess it up and take you to the front page of the site instead (Gawker blogs are like this). Amazon is another site that doesn’t do this well. I run into this when I want to share a link to a book on Amazon, but I’m on my iPhone so I end up sharing a mobile link, which looks like crap on a regular browser and doesn’t include a button for switching back.

Another peeve is sites whose mobile version is very limited and who automatically route you to it if you’re on a mobile device. For example, I’m watching a TV show and they advertise a link for merchandise or a contest. If I type in that link on my iPhone it takes me to a generic NBC site, say, and the promoted content is nowhere to be found.

Sorry for rambling. As you can see this is kind of a pet peeve of mine. :)

I agree with Kevin, that there needs to be a way to get to the desktop version of the site. That’s after using device detection like Igor is using.

Our nearly-universal recommendation: detect the device, render the most appropriate experience you can. But provide a link at the bottom of a mobile page to get to the desktop version, and a link at the top of a desktop page to get to the mobile version.

And every link must work no matter the device clicking on it.

Kevin, I share your pet peeve, and Barbara, I think your nearly-universal recommendation is spot on. I can’t think of a scenario where that wouldn’t be appropriate.

Redirecting from desktop -> mobile or vice versa to an appropriate page is doable, but it’s often not that easy. On a directory site I once worked on, we eventually figured out how to redirect like-for-like pages automatically i.e. if you arrive at a desktop page (say via a search engine) that belongs to 'my home services’ then the mobile version of the same page is served up seamlessly. Sounds trivial, but there was a fair bit involved in delivering that.

Hi, Thanks for this update.The link publisher is good to get more mobile users.I will try to do for my services and hope Opera don’t do anything bad to my link.

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we use handsetdetection.com when developing new sites / microsites. In some cases, we just use an on / off type model, and in other cases, we adjust the actual content based on screen size and location.

There are lots of services out there that provide this kind of data / service. just google “handset detection” and they all come up..