My Major Website Annoyance

[Chip Grueter]

Lately I've noticed a trend with dealer website providers to automatically detect that I'm on my (i)phone and automatically redirect me to the mobile version of the website. That's not my pet peeve, as it's a Coke/Pepsi thing - half the people like it, half don't. What I find really annoying is when I get redirected, no matter what page I just requested or clicked a link to, I get redirected to the mobile homepage, with no way to view the actual link, except to try and find it using the mobile site's hierarchy.

As a developer, I understand how much easier it is to just funnel all mobile traffic directly to the mobile homepage, but putting in that extra effort to redirect a user to the proper mobile VERSION of that page they requested will make for a much smoother and happier experience.

With mobile search becoming much more popular, I think it's really important to tackle this with the website providers as someone searching on their phone isn't going to want to have to find the information twice.

/rant

Chip-

 

[joe.pistell]

*ditto

 

[mattwatson81]

Lately I've noticed a trend with dealer website providers to automatically detect that I'm on my (i)phone and automatically redirect me to the mobile version of the website. That's not my pet peeve, as it's a Coke/Pepsi thing - half the people like it, half don't. What I find really annoying is when I get redirected, no matter what page I just requested or clicked a link to, I get redirected to the mobile homepage, with no way to view the actual link, except to try and find it using the mobile site's hierarchy.

As a developer, I understand how much easier it is to just funnel all mobile traffic directly to the mobile homepage, but putting in that extra effort to redirect a user to the proper mobile VERSION of that page they requested will make for a much smoother and happier experience.

With mobile search becoming much more popular, I think it's really important to tackle this with the website providers as someone searching on their phone isn't going to want to have to find the information twice.

/rant

Chip-

A site should auto redirect when you just go to the domain name, but either way it goes it should have a link at the bottom of the page or something to jump to the other.

 

[NTIV10]

I use PHP primarily, and it's easy to avoid this problem without creating multiple versions of the page or complicated coding. For example, you can set it up to load a specific CSS style based on a ? argument in the URL, like http://www.mysite.com/index.php?browser=iphone and that would load "iphone.css" and the iPhone formatted site. I've used this technique before with success.

 

[Taddeo]

i concur with said rant

I love when people offer at the bottom of the mobi page to go to the websites full version website, or stay on the mobi site.