The BBC and Guardian: more reasons I hate mobile sites 1
Mobile versions of websites - what a train crash they often are. As I write this, at 10.30pm on Monday night, neither the BBC nor Guardian mobile websites are mentioning that Gordon Brown has promised to resign ... a story that their web news pages are unsurprising leading with - and have been doing so for several hours.
I'm sure it's hard to implement a mobile version of a website - with ITV's mobile site particularly demonstrating why they're often rubbish.
But I expected rather more of the BBC and the Guardian. In fact, if you've been using their mobile sites for the last few days, you'd have been under the impression that there has been little news about the election to report...
The Guardian
Here's the Guardian's mobile version tonight - no mention of Gordon Brown quitting.
Guardian: no sign of resigning PMs
And here's its web version - leading with the news.
Guardian web: Brown's resigned
The BBC
Here's the BBC mobile site on Sunday morning - literally no mention of the election whatsoever. It's been like this for days...
BBC mobile: any election news?
And here's the web version of its news pages at the same time. Oh, there's an election.
BBC web: there's an election!
And tonight, again, there is no mention of the election and no mention of Brown's resignation on the mobile version of the BBC's news pages:
Brown has resigned, I'm sure ...
Back to the drawing board, please.
I'm no expert, but could this be to do with the mobile operators caching sites? I would have thought the content of these big sites are just styled differently for certain browsers rather than seperate content systems. But like I say, i'm no expert.