I love how The Telegraph does mobile

The Telegraph newspaper has a superb way of delivering their website to your mobile phone.

I have to tell you how clever the Telegraph’s webmasters and servers are.

I read the Telegraph’s mobile site on my mobile phone each morning and each evening while I commute. While it’s incredibly brief and concise, and only has a few stories on its front page, it’s better than The Times’ mobile site because The Times makes you click through six pages for each story! Yawn!

I go to http://telegraph.co.uk/mobile/ – you should check it out if you’re on the trains.

Clever webmasters

So I wanted to tell you how clever the Telegraph’s webmasters are. Instead of creating separate content for their mobile site, they’ve done the ideal, and they use the very same content as on their normal website.

Check out this address (and click the page to see the normal web page):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/economy/3153239/Olympics-at-risk-from-ID-fraudsters-MPs-warn.html

I like this URL (web address) because it’s ‘human readable’ and clearly shows the directory structure of their websites – you can tell this news story is a political and economic one just from scanning the URL.

Now take a look at this mobile web address, and click it to see how the mobile web page looks (remember, it would be very skinny on your phone, it’s wider on your computer screen):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/economy/3153239/Olympics-at-risk-from-ID-fraudsters-MPs-warn.html?mobile=true

See? All they’ve done is add ?mobile=true to the end of the URL to tell the server to send you the stripped down, no adverts no nonsence version of the page. Wonderful use of technology, and they don’t use .php or .asp at the end of their address – it’s good ol’ standard .html

Bravo Telegraph, bravo.

[Wedge]
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