Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

News sites need to remember mobile visitors

Dear mashable, huffington, and all you other large news aggregation sites that people like to tweet and retweet,

Kindly keep in mind that the fastest growing segment of Internet users globally is mobile, which means their screens are typically small enough to fit in their pockets.

Although your sites (debatably) look okay when squished to half a screen width on desktops and laptops, the same cannot be said for even the biggest and best mobile phones (without zooming and panning like mad)

Here's my suggestion...

About 12 years ago we came up with a standard called 'WAP', which meant a few things but primarily it meant you had to deliver a custom experience for mobile browsers.  It was a bit trickier then than it is now - all you really need today is to detect the browser and render the content differently.  You know, like full width with a large font, so all of us trying to read you regurgitated stories can do it on load, without a lot of pinching and panning just to make the words visible.

I'd unfollow you, since you're basically just syndicating other people's news anyway, but it seems almost all the sites out there suffer from the same disease.  And what with all the retweeting going on, I don't think I could ever really escape the insanity anyway.

So please just get a clue and do the right thing.  The mobile internet is the fastest growing part, and it has been for a while now...