Questions about mobile site developement

Mobi site is duplicated content

[virtualreality]

Hello,
I'm developing a mobi site for my website and I intend to put it on a separate subdomain mobi.mysite.com. I'm concerned that the mini mobi site will be a duplicate site of my original website. So I was thinking to stop the spiders going to the mobi site, but then there would be no way for people to find it in mobile search engines. What should I do? I don't want to get a separate .mobi domain name and I can't rewrite my site for the mobile version because my site has tons of content (it is an info site).

Also is it possible for the mobile site to be easily converted to iphone app?

[Brett_Tabke]

#1: put a link at the very top of your standard template somewhere so that people can immediately click it.
#2: agent sniff for the default 5-6 top smart phones and redirect them to the mobile site. You can actually do that via js.

[virtualreality]

I am not sure what you mean? Can you convert mobi site to an iphone app?

[virtualreality]

Also can a mobi site have GPS functionality?

[Brett_Tabke]

Alot of mobile sites are being put at m.domain.com. That is M as a third level domain inplace of your normal www.domian.com. Mobi is pretty much a nonstarter and few are using for anything except spam.

> iphone app

I wasn't referring to that. Unless you are a large site taking in well over six figures a year, a iphone app just wouldn't make econ sense unless you can produce a value add.

What you can do, is develop a smart phone friendly version of your site that will server all phones with browser and not just one os.

[virtualreality]

Ok thank you. I appreciate your reply. Can a smart phone site have a gps?

[virtualreality]

anyone?

[weeks]

Can a smart phone site have a gps?

You need to explain more here what you are trying to do. I don't know why an info site would want this. But, anyway, here's some background:
[msdn.microsoft.com...]

msdn.microsoft.com Windows Mobile - Use GPS And Web Maps For Location-Aware Apps

[Musicarl]

What about the question of duplicate content and user agent detection:

1) How can we make sure our mobile sites aren't seen as duplicate content?

2) If we provide a link to the mobile site in the main site template, should we still agent sniff?

[weeks]

[google.com...]

(Question: Are you certain you need a mobile site? I'm assuming you've given this some thought and it is obvious that this is an important market for you AND, most of all, the primary site simply is not workable, at all, on the mobile devices your users use. Some text heavy sites convert OK on some mobile browsers.)

[Harry]

HTML 5 allows for geolocation.

[rekitty]

Brett_Tabke wrote:
#2: agent sniff for the default 5-6 top smart phones and redirect them to the mobile site. You can actually do that via js.

Is redirecting to m.example.com/contentxyz via js the best practice?

I was thinking I'd do the redirect on the server side rather than in js, otherwise my oversized page (I know) at www.example.com/contentxyz has to download to the phone before js starts up and does the redirect.

Am I missing something?

[adamxcl]

I've played around with the HTML 5 geolocation. I have come close to duplicating some features of my apps with it. And you can structure a page to act like a app as well. It's just not quite there for a lot of mainstream use but it's something to work on. I'm definitely looking for a time when I could use HTML5 to create a app like experience for all devices.