Mobile friendly Websites with Google

Shekhar — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:30:42 +0000

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:

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

Note:

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)
The images are actually stripped off (and not simply hidden), if you select “No Images”.
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:

Shekhar Govindarajan's Blog » text only version

Mobile friendly Websites with Google