Designing mobile-ready websites is a new interest of mine and I’ve been spending a lot of time researching best practices and capturing screenshots of sites that I think do it well.
What’s nice (or unfortunate…?) is that although a lot of sites have mobile-ready content, there are only a “few” of the larger sites that are doing it well. As such, this keeps my research time to a minimum; I like that.
Here are 8 of my favorite mobile sites that I’ve learned a lot from in terms of how they display content and the user experience:
Got any favorites you’d suggest?
Google has done a really nice job with their mobile sites. Gvoice mobile site for the iPhone blows my mind,
I agree! I’ve got a iPod Touch and I’ve stopped syncing my Google calendar with iCal on it… I’m just using the Google calendar mobile site. It’s pretty much the same design and I don’t have to worry about sync issues anymore!
So I am limited to looking at screenshots of the mobile web. Sad day you know? But from what I’ve seen…the good ones do a good job of communicating that it’s still “mashable” even though it’s mobile. Facebook probably does this best, since their UI lends itself to “mobilization.”
But it looks like the approach to mobile web design is completely different to traditional, which makes me wonder if entrenched bastions of webUI (Digg??) will even be *most* effective at the stuff.
That is to say I think the *most* innovation will come from yet-undiscovered places.
soooo.. your missing a 8bit network mobile version… because that may be the best
Great that you pulled those websites out… we are 2 weeks away from launching our Churches mobile website, and they are some of the exact sites we looked at. You’re right- there aren’t many good ones out there!
It has taken us a long time- almost 6 months of development and we still have features in the queue that will be released in the coming months.
We found it a very fine line between successfully providing content AND features (I believe they are very different things on a mobile website) while keeping it graphically rich. All that to say we are really very happy with it and can’t wait to see our members using it!
Oh, and it’s all built on WordPress.
WIN!
Google’s mobile site is great! And has an extremely fast load time!
cnet.com has a pretty good mobile site, and I can’t go past the wp touch plugin that is on many wordpress blogs, simple reading and commenting.
I must admit that I find sites without mobile versions frustrating to view on the road.
Google’s mobile site has just recently become very nice, IMO. Until their recent refresh, the search bar was really small and hard to use, but now it’s nice and large for people with big thumbs (me).
Of course I’m a fan of the cloversite mobile site! Can’t wait until the beginning of May when our new website finally launches. (We’ve been waiting because of the Greenhouse 2.0 release happening on April 28th.)
http://m.youversion.com got a major overhaul last quarter. I think it’s pretty legit, but I’m *probably* a little biased.
Oh yeah, Gowalla has a great-looking mobile site. http://m.gowalla.com
We did this one a while back: http://mobile.dts.edu/
… wow. hawtness.