Being trendy, a while back I looked into creating a special web page to greet users of mobile devices. Just a few days ago, I killed it off.
Special mobile web pages are nothing new. Years ago, I had a link on the Wambooli home page for “hand-held devices.” If you clicked the link, you’d see a specially-formatted Wambooli web page, one that was easier to read on a smaller screen.
Years later, I revised that page specifically for mobile device users.
I crafted (well, stole actually) special code that detected a mobile device. If you had one, and you landed on the Wambooli home page, you were instantly redirected to the Wambooli Mobile page. You can still view that page by clicking this link:
The page shows up well on a small phone. But when I used my tablet with a considerably larger screen, the web page looks, well, stupid.
I found myself instantly regretting the mobile page, switching instead to the “desktop” mode for viewing my own home page: On an Android device running the Chrome browser, you can request the desktop site to avoid those customized mobile pages.
Trends come and go, and with mobile devices getting larger — e.g., the Galaxy Note, Nexus 6, and even the iPhone 6 Plus — I don’t really see a need any more for a customized home page. In fact, I’m growing more annoyed at mobile versions of web pages as I surf the net on my handheld gizmos. After all, there must be some substantial reason why Google thought to add the Request Desktop Site command in the Chrome mobile browser. Duh.
Anyway, so I disabled automatic switching to the Wambooli mobile site for mobile gizmos. In fact, I noticed that some of the newer gizmos automatically request the desktop site, which is awesome.
I’ll keep the mobile site up for a while longer before I take it down. But for the future, I don’t see customized mobile versions of web sites gaining in popularity.
