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Comment by joshuak | Hacker News Reader

Please. Don't. Make. Mobile. Versions. Of. Your. Website!!11!1!!!

Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site? Really? Aren't you just changing the links to buttons, and reusing the content? Be honest.

The one exception is if you are implementing a proper full stack html 5 application. With truly valuable features over the standard website (but then why haven't you done that for the main site too?). Even then, always have a path back to the main site, and keep an eye out for how often that link gets used.

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Ask yourself, are you going to put in the same amount of design and content work into the mobile site as the main site?

Yes? Anyone not doing that in 2013 is deluded- mobile browsing figures are huge and ever increasing. I can forsee a situation where people design for mobile first, not one where they ignore it entirely.

What is wrong with reusing content? When I visit a site on mobile I don't want different content because I happen to be using a different device.

Precisely. There is nothing wrong with reusing your content, so then why would you need a new interface for it?

When you do truly need a new interface to something it's because the nature of the something is different. True mobile apps don't use and apply content the same as a web site any more then a video game is a movie.

I don't think there's anything wrong with simply using the same content under a different layout that is optimized for smaller screens/touch.

I suggest you do a quick survey of the replies to this thread. Most people HATE it. Apple designed a browser that addresses the size issue, no reason to do it again poorly.

I also suspect that developers, such as myself, are looking at a site on several platforms and so automatically compare them, but when a user focuses on their phone it fills their perception.

Giving people bigger buttons, and text might seem nicer initially, but it's usually very aggravating when the scaling is locked and with the real site you can scale the text even bigger then the choice you made for the user. Plus many other issues with content relationships (text and images say), usability, etc.

If your designers are going to put as much effort into the mobile site layout as they did to the main site then maybe, but I have yet to see that happen.

I find that many desktop websites are entirely unusable on mobile, because I can't hover over menus without a mouse. Plus, I dislike waiting for 5MB (or more) of webfonts, ads, and javascript to download over a mobile connection in order to read a 3 paragraph blog post.

I don't see desktop sites getting smaller, and I don't think they should get rid of hover-based navigation, so the solution could easily be a stripped-down version for touchscreen devices on slow networks. That doesn't require huge buttons, locked scaling, or high-end design and layout.

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