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Type www.businessweek.com into your cell phone’s browser and you will be re-directed to www.businessweek.mobi, a version formatted for mobile devices. More and more sites are employing this strategy to help direct mobile users to mobile content. This is great way to help promote the mobile Web and accelerate users getting to the content they want, but there are some drawbacks that content owners need to address.

Browsers and users’ choice
With Safari on the iPhone users, new browsers like Deepfish and Skyfire on the way, and the increased browsing capabilities of Internet Explorer Mobile and Opera Mobile, users want to be able to choose between a mobile formatted site and the traditional Web site.

Reasons for this vary. If you look at MacWorld’s Web site and compare it to what they offer mobile users, you will notice that the content is significantly reduced. If my handset has the capability to render the normal site, albeit more slowly, I should have the option to get to the content I want.

Another example came when I was using the AT&T 8525 to access corporate email. A colleague sent me the link to an article in BusinessWeek. The 8525 has a nice landscape screen and runs Internet Explorer Mobile which can view most sites. When I attempted to follow the link to the article, the redirect BusinessWeek uses kept forcing me back to the their .mobi home page. It was incredibly frustrating to be forced to browse where BusinessWeek thought I wanted to go.

I had to wait until I could access the site from the laptop to see the article. Had this been business critical information regarding a customer, it could have had a negative affect on the meeting I was about to attend.

The answer is simple – allow users a choice and apply cookies. If users can toggle between versions at their discretion and use cookies to record their preference, content owners will not frustrate and lose readers.