What the site needs to do is know that the user is coming from a mobile device by detecting the device. Then, the site needs to serve up the appropriate page under m.site.com to the user, thus not making the user have to think. Obviously, the site also needs to:

1) Make Relevant information easy to find – spend resources on ease of navigation
2) Keep Content To A Minimum
3) Make a Familiar and Non-Threatening Path to the Information
4) The Information Must Appear Correctly the First Time
5) And Lastly, Test, Test and Re-test! (Use a full lab of mobile devices to see what your customers are seeing!)

And I must admit, something I hadn’t even thought about.

Nice work.

Take a global brand, someone like Pepsi. They’ve built themselves up by being locale specific with regards to their promotions, and websites etc. – if I’m French, i’d go to http://ww.pepsi.fr/, if i’m Dutch, http://www.pepsi.nl/ and so on.

How are they supposed to accomplish this with .mobi? Is it http://fr.pepsi.mobi/?

http://m.pepsi.fr/ is far more intuitive, works with the exising TLD infrastructure, and costs no additional money for the registrant. So why anyone would even think of using .mobi is beyond me.

Nice response.

James, I have to take issue with your statement – Vodafone users *do* have a choice.

The first time a Vodafone customer tries to access the web, they get asked “do you want Vodafone to adapt pages to better suit your phone?”

The user can, at any time (even as they’re browsing a page) change their transcoding preferences. If the transcoder is screwing up a page, there’s a link at the bottom of the page saying “See Original” or “Unmodified” I forget which.

They can also go to Web Preferences on Vodafone live and permanently change the transcoding options.

The transcoder doesn’t alter mobile friendly pages. Anything on an m. server, .mobi domain, valid xhtml-mp, https sites regulated by the FSA or on a whitelist remain unchanged.

Finally, the user can use a different APN – internet – granted a bit technical for a “normob”.

I think that’s a fair bit of choice. It certainly means that anyone with a crappy old phone on GPRS can visit a lot more websites than they used to.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that transcoding can only ever be a stop-gap solution. One day we’ll all be on UMTS running Webkit / Firefox / Opera. We’ll have lasers beaming 22 inch images directly into our eyeballs. Everyone will be writing valid XHTML / HTML 5.

Until that day, people can access WAP sites, they can access mobile friendly sites, they can access “full fat” sites and, if they choose, have them shrunk to work on their phone.

Blimey, that’s a lot of text to type onto a Blackberry!