M for Mobile

Design World content is now available in a new mobile format >> of course the site is best viewed with any number of mobile or smart phone formats. Still maintaining a first generation iPhone, I think the browser and regular versions of sites look pretty good – but then also maintaining a first generation iPhone, I’m an obvious fan of very lightweight sites that load quickly. So we did our best to pick latest news, and a few select categories to focus on the mobile version with option to view standard or moble full versions of articles. In addition, we loaded in Engineering Exchange resources and community links. Many of our Tip sites and Renewable energy sites are mobile friendly, so we view mobile as just another extension in line with our philosophy to reach people on their terms.

Currently we have custom sponsorship on the mobile site along with use of AdMob. And speaking of AdMob, its another minor battle in positioning: excerpt from eWeek: “Bloggers discovered language in the revised iPhone operating system’s developer terms of service that indicated iPhone developers would not be able to collect data without users’ consent and sell the data to advertisers that are owned by a distributor or developer of mobile devices…. That includes AdMob, Google and others. The FTC is reportedly checking into Apple’s practices in the mobile ad market for possible transgressions against Google and Adobe’s Flash technology. ” In any case we’ll be sure to utilize best practices on the ad front to comply with any mobile devices.

Additionally, if you hit Design World in the next week  on a mobile device you will get an auto redirect to the mobile site with the exclusion of the iPad. I noticed several sites on the iPad redirect to a mobile version based on the safari agent and this is sub-optimal in most cases for obvious reasons. It pretty easy to distinguish the iPad agent and add the exclusion.

So fire away and let me know or comment on what we need to add, what you would like to see, etc on the mobile version of Design World.