How Are Your Users Finding Your Mobile Site?

Lee Zoumas - February 10, 2010

More and more frequently companies are adding a mobile version of their website to their online arsenal. Mobile sites are a great way to provide quick information to people on the go or to serve as a portal to your main website. There are many different ways for a user to arrive at your mobile site. The simplest, is to just place a link on your main site to the mobile version. That kind of defeats the purpose though, because mobile devices have a limited viewing area, so users may never be able to find the link, which would render your mobile site almost useless. The most ideal way for your users to find your mobile website is to place a browser detector script on your main website’s homepage, which will then redirect the user to your mobile website, if they are using a mobile device.

A browser detector is usually written in a server-side scripting language, such as PHP or ASP.NET. However, some websites use HTML only and not a server-side scripting language. This can potentially pose a problem for websites to properly identify a mobile browser and redirect to its mobile version. It is possible to use JavaScript, a client-side scripting language, and HTML to detect the browser, but most cell phones do not support JavaScript yet, so this method is not typically recommended.

If your website is one of the unlucky ones that is exclusively using HTML, you may still be able to properly redirect your users to your mobile website. The first thing to determine is if your host allows you to run a server-side scripting language. Just because your site is coded in HTML does not mean your host does not allow you to use a server-side scripting language.

If your host does allow you to use a server side scripting language, then you have two options. The first is to have the HTM and HTML extension be processed by a server-side scripting language. This means that although your page is an HTML page, it will be able to process server-side code, such as ASP or PHP. This approach is probably the easiest and does not require modifying any of the actual code of your website. There are many different ways to create this setting, but you should check with your host or IT department to see if this is possible with your current hosting setup.

If your host does not allow you to change the way HTML or HTM files are processed, your next option is recode your site’s homepage in a server-side language that your host allows. This could be as simple as saving the current homepage, index.html for example, to a new extension, such as index.php. After you do that, it is extremely important to 301 redirect the homepage URL to the newly created URL. Again, check with your host or IT department to see if your hosting setup has the ability to perform 301 redirects. If you cannot perform 301 redirects, then you should manually change all the links back to your new homepage and do a meta refresh to the new page. A meta refresh is not ideal for SEO, but it is the only way to preserve links to the old homepage. The only other alternative at this point is to select a different host.

Now that your homepage is set up for the browser detector script, you just need to add it to your homepage. I will discuss how to do this in a future post, but as you can see, there is a lot to consider when “going mobile” and you need to make sure you have all your ducks in a row, or your new mobile site will never get the traffic it deserves.