I read a rather alarming article which says TODAY that Google will penalize sites that don't offer a mobile version. I've yet to read the details but am obviously desperate to avoid search penalties.
In particular, I have a very highly ranked site in a very competitive space. Sadly, this site is over 10 years old and was built with a bazillion links in the header and footer and has no mobile layout features at all. I feel that a complete redesign will be required to break down one's navigational choices such that the available screen space on a mobile device is not utterly consumed by navigational options. This sounds fairly onerous and will require some design-by-committee.
I was rather hoping there might be some easy way to recognize if a mobile device is visiting and show an alternative layout to such machines. I'm not really sure if this will satisfy the criteria to avoid "MobileGeddon" -- I'll be reading up on that -- but it seems like an obvious thing to do for our pages that are popular at least. I've heard two different schools of thought on this:
1) from the server, sniff out the USER AGENT and look for certain earmarks that suggest mobile devices. There's probably a framework or library for this somewhere.
2) show the same page for both mobile and large-screen browsers and load a Javascript library which sniffs browser capabilities (e.g., screen size) and builds an interface accordingly.
I've also seen situations where my mobile devices see an entirely different url (e.g., mobile.example.com/file.php versus example.com/file.php). It seems a real chore to me to maintain two entirely separate domains (and possibly code bases) and to understand when to switch back and forth between one and the other, but perhaps there's some sort of clever mod_rewrite rule that manages this.
Any thoughts are much appreciated.
