We are getting ready to release mobile access to WineLog. I wanted to pose a question around this, and I hope to get at least a few responses. So here goes…

What should we make the address for the WineLog mobile site?

Here are a few options. Feel free to come up with your own.

• http://winelog.mobi
• http://mobile.winelog.net
• http://mob.winelog.net
• http://winelog.net/mobile

We picked up the winelog.mobi domain a little while ago “just in case”. I’m not really a fan of the new top-level domain. Creating a separate subdomain for the mobile version seems much more elegant to me. Although, keeping the mobile site and regular site on different domains will help with traffic tracking and the such.

The effect on Google juice should also be taken into account though. By using a different top-level domain, we’ll be losing the Google ranking we’ve established. But maybe a .mobi address will help with mobile search engine ranking. I doubt it though since Google themselves aren’t using the .mobi domain. http://www.google.mobi redirects to http://www.google.com/mobile.

“mob” is quicker to type than “mobile” or “mobi”, so I’m pretty fond of mob.winelog.net. But I also want to keep to any standards that have been developing. My only experience with this so far is http://mobilicio.us, where we made the base site the mobile site and use http://mobilicio.us/www as the “project site” meant to be viewed from a larger screen. The mobile application was what people would want, so we put it right there at the root level. We did use the funny .us top-level domain to stay hip and remind people of the interaction with http://del.icio.us.

So I’m really looking forward to everyone’s opinions on this. Thanks in advance.

By jason |  January 17th, 2007 | 6:56 pm |  Filed under Web, Browsers, WineLog, Mobile Web | Permalink