A mobile website is designed and developed to take account of smartphone screen dimensions, touch screen technologies and indeed the fact that smart phone users are increasingly familiar with the look and feel of native apps.
You can have a mobile website which sits completely independent of your main website, whether under a subdomain (e.g. yourmobilesite.yourmainsite.com) or a mobile domain (e.g. yourmainsite.mobi), or as a subfolder of your main site (e.g. yourmainsite.com/mobile). Generally speaking you’d put code in your main website to detect mobile users and serve up, or re-direct them to, the mobile version of your site.
It’s also possible to have a separate style sheet for users accessing it from mobile devices, so they’d see a mobile site but from your main domain. Responsive website designs are based on this format.
There are advantages and disadvantages of each approach outlined above, and a well thought out mobile strategy includes due consideration of the main website and mobile website, mobile web apps and whether to use native apps as part of the mix.
At Really Useful Websites, we cover off the various options as part of the initial chat with potential clients.
