cc'ing gatein-dev on this email as other may have some options on this.
On Tue, 2012-04-10 at 18:40 -0300, Gabriel Cardoso wrote:
Hi Mark!
Its Matt :)
I took a look in your article. You told that "We should be
displaying and advertising that the site has alternative sites for different devices, so
it might not make sense to hide this in the footer area".
I agree that putting the link in the header is an effective advertising, but stepping
back, how interesting is for the users who are not using a mobile to know that now the
site supports mobile?
Something I do all the time on my tablet is switch between the 'mobile'
site and the desktop version of the site (mostly it's from mobile to
desktop since on most sites, their mobile version is meant for phones,
not tablets, and it a horrible experience). This comes down to user
preference.
The main usecase for this functionality is if I am on a phone and I go
to the site. For some reason my phone doesn't get detected as a mobile
device. Now I am on the desktop version of the site, on a phone, and its
a bad experience.
Since my phone didn't get detected as being a mobile device the first
time, I can't just dynamically display a link on the desktop site if I
think they are a mobile, since doing the detection again isn't going to
change anything.
So displaying the link now is for catching this error condition.
If I have a link at the top of the page (ideally near the top left),
then I can easily see on my phone that there is a site designed for my
device and I can hit the link to go there (discoverability)
If its in the footer, than I would have to scroll all the way through
the page and have to search for the link (and I would have to do this
blindly and assume there is such a link somewhere on the page, which may
or may not be true for most sites).
It also comes down to if I am on the mobile site and I click the link to
visit the main desktop site. I see that the desktop site doesn't work
properly at all on my tablet (maybe its heavily flash based). So now how
do I get back to the mobile site? Clicking the link changes the users
preference, so the next time they visit the site, they are going to be
redirected to the desktop based on this preference.
If anyone can come up with another way of handling these situations,
then maybe we don't need the redirect links in the header.
I believe that users should notice that a mobile version is available
when they access using a mobile. Beyond that, maybe it's useless information guided by
business goals.
If we think in this way, an interesting strategy is to show a link "Access the full
site" or "Desktop version" in the footer when the user is in the mobile
site. It's not necessary to show other links when he is in the desktop version.
But that's only my point of view. If showing the add to everybody is a business
requirement, I think your solution is perfect. If not, maybe we could do in a different
way.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Gabriel