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Mobile friendly Websites with Google

While browsing the Web on your mobile phone/PDA, you will come across many web sites which are not readable, do not fit in your mobile screen or are graphic intensive. Following is a quick and Google way to see a mobile optimized view of any Website:

  1. Using the Web browser in your mobile device, goto the URL http://www.google.com/gwt/n
  2. In the text box, key in the URL of the website, that you want to visit.
  3. Optionally, check the box “No Images” if you do not want to see/download images on the website.
  4. Click on Go.
  5. And you would see, a rather clean, only vertically scrolling, website.
  6. Henceforth, you would like to make http://www.google.com/gwt/n the default page of your mobile’s Web browser.

Note:

  1. Once you visit a site using the above method, and further, click on links on the site, the resulting pages will also be mobile optimized. (technically: all links in the site are rewritten to redirect through this URL i.e. http://www.google.com/gwt/n)
  2. The images are actually stripped off (and not simply hidden), if you select “No Images”.
  3. The mobile optimized markup has all whitespaces and newlines removed. This means a much smaller page and hence faster download on your mobile.

Webmasters may provide a link on their Website(s) to the mobile friendly version. For example: for www.foo.com the link will be: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foo.com

Screenshots:

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Discussion

4 comments for “Mobile friendly Websites with Google”

  1. Neat stuff!
    So I can create m.mysite.com & point it to this url eh? Smooth.

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    Posted by Binesh Kutty | August 24, 2008, 7:07 pm
  2. Yep, when someone visits m.mysite.com, you can redirect him to the following URL:

    http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com

    assuming that http://www.mysite.com is your site’s URL.

    The redirection can be setup at the web server level or at the script (e.g. PHP, ASP .Net) level.

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    Posted by Shekhar | August 25, 2008, 12:44 am
  3. Point 6 in the post has an extra “w” in the “wwww” :)

    Nice find btw…

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    Posted by makuchaku | April 27, 2009, 10:05 am
  4. Point 6 in the post has an extra “w” in the “wwww”

    Fixed. Thanks :-)

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    Posted by Shekhar | April 27, 2009, 12:48 pm

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