Importance of Single Domains for Web and Mobile
Posted by Rich Gubby on May 9, 2009 at 6:03 pmFiled under: Mobile Device and Browser Detection, Mobile Internet, Mobile SEO, Mobile Web Design, Mobile Web Development, Mobile Websites
Fact: People are accessing your website URL on their mobile phone!
The latest stats suggest that 5% of traffic to websites now get hit by mobile browsers, even if you promote a separate URL for mobile web.
What do you want them to see? The actual website that takes 20 minutes to load and scrolls to about 10 times the width and height of the mobile? Not likely. They’ll want to see a mobile specific version, running off that single domain, perfectly optimized to whichever handset they’re using, yes, even if they have an iPhone. Mobile users are getting a bad experience either because you don’t have a mobile website or you do but are promoting a separate URL for it! You don’t actually need a separate URL for mobile web and if you do have one currently you’re probably having the headache of getting people to use it.
Websites are designed for big screens with a mouse and pointer so mobile websites should reflect the smaller window, slower connection and alternative interface but both versions should be accessed through the same URL. Architect allows the development of mobile friendly websites and one single domain – something that everyone should be striving towards.
We’ve recently mobilized the wapple.net website so that’s it’s accessible on mobile with the same URL, why not have a read of it and see how we did it.
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May 11th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Great little post! Agree 100% with the frustrations of hitting a domain and getting a full-blown website which is inappropriate for my screen size.
BUT i do think there should always be the option for the user to goto the full-website if they want. Twitter.com does this pretty well (but shame on the actual mobile site)
June 10th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Nice little post. This is something that I think is really underestimated on the web, and people moving into mobile should consider a single domain one oftheir highest priorities.
Being able to use all of the SEO from your website for both the web and the mobile version of a site brings massive time and efficiency savings to running your site, not to mention better SEO in general. SEO is hard, and even harder when you have to do it twice for the same content on two different domains. By using two domains, you’re effectively competing with yourself for SEO.
I wouldn’t use a different domain for IE and Firefox versions of my site, so why whould I use a different domain for web and mobile versions? Sematically, you are displaying the same web resource to the user, and thus it should be identified by the same URI.