Separate .mobi site or make .com site mobile friendly?

[zharriet]

Our website now has enough mobile traffic to justify going mobile friendly, which it is not at this time.

I am in favor of making a separate .mobi site designed specifically for mobile phones and smart phones for several reasons. It is cheaper, faster, and easier to accomplish. I think our mobile users will have a good experience though obviously not as much info as our full site.

I would use ourdomain.mobi with link or a redirect for mobile users from from the main site.

My top three choices for implementing that are

• http://allwebcodesign.com/setup/mobi-templates.htm#detailsarea
  Template that can be viewed by mobile or desktop.
• http://www.onbile.com/
• http://www.networksolutions.com/mobile-website/index.jsp

Does this seem like a good solution?

[kennyrowe]

I'm a fan of just developing your .com to fit mobile sites.

My two reasons are:

1. If the user is on their phone & typing in the URL, they probably are going to do .com instead of .mobi. And if they're using a search engine, they may not find the .mobi. Unless, of course, you are doing some kind of autoredirect that detects when people are on mobile devices and then sends them to the .mobi site.

2. From a content management perspective, I like the simplicity of only having one site to update. I suppose this really depends on how much content you have on your site, how often you update, and how your back-end works. I'd look at how much time and effort it takes to update your current content, consider how much of it you'd want on the .mobi & how often you'd be updating that, and factor that into your decision if you're optimizing the .com or going with a .mobi. For the sites I work on, the issue of content really pushed me into deciding to optimize the .com.

[zharriet]

Thank you!

What do you think about using a .mobi site with the auto-redirect as a temporary solution until we can optimize the .com for mobile users? It may be several months before we can roll that out. I really want to keep the mobile users coming to our site.

[kennyrowe]

You're welcome!

I think having a temporary option is great if there's enough mobile traffic coming to your website that you know it's vital for your customers. You can always put a "full, un-optimized for mobile" site link to allow mobile users to get out of the mobile interface if they can't find what they're looking for in the temporary mobile site.