Adding Mobi URLS

I added a slot in the community color add link program for a Mobi URL. A mobi site is version of a web page optimized for mobile phones. Mobile phones have really small screens ... usually about 300 pixels in width.

Mobi sites tend to show summarized information from the main site. Each community directory has a Mobi version with the subdomain m.. For example the Mobi version of ProvoUtah.US is m.ProvoUtah.US.

Anyway, after you define the primary URL for your site, you can add a Mobi URL. The field for the Mobi URL is the second to last line on the form. You have to be logged in to add a link.

NOTE: If your site is already listed in the web directory, just add the link to your mobi site as if it was the primary URL.

PS: I appreciate the few people who pay the listing fee as it is costly to maintain a directory. If you paid the listing fee for your primary site, just add the link and ignore the plea for payment on the last page.

Mobile Pages

Wow, it takes a lot of work to make little pages.

I am busily working away on the mobile version of Community Color.

I decided I needed to add some "content pages" to feed the web bots from the search engines. My idea of content super simply pages that introduced the community.

Here is a sample page for Colorado National Monument ... which will celebrate its centennial this year.

To help the search engines find the mobi sites, I am daisy chaining the content site.

I wrote a half dozen content pages and decided to tweet about them using the mlnk.us URL shortener ... and realized I made a grave mistake.

My new URL shortener has slots for the HTML and MOBI version of a page ... but I had one HTML page and six MOBI pages I wanted to tweet about.

I could have made a short URL for each of the new sites. I would then issue six tweets for each of the pages.

I decides that was too spammy. So, I redesigned MLNK.us to allow for up to 100 URLS.

This short URL for this project is mlnk.us/pages. The short URL has links back to this blog post and the seven about pages I created.

Tweet Your Link

While on the topic of mobile phones ....

I find filling out forms on my phone too tedious.

Scatching my head, I wanted to find a way for smartphone users to give me the link to their web site. To make the process easy, a "Tweet me your link" page to the Community Color mobile directories.

Here is the Grand Junction Tweet Your Link Page.

The page has the link:

Hey @CommunityColor You should add the site _____ to http://gjct.com

The link produces a tweet with my twitter account and a link to my site. It is so fiendish!

If people fell for this gimmick used this process, then I would learn about their site and maybe get some inbound links.

SEO & MOBI

A MOBI page is a page optimized for mobile phones. Since the pages will be displayed on tiny screens, the pages need to present tightly summarized information and they need to emphasize the navigational elements of the page.

It is wise to have links back to the main HTML site just in case a person with a real web browser stumbles onto a mobi page and wants to access the web optimized page.

This combination of summarized content and robust linking structure means that MOBI development offers a great opportunity for Search Engine Optimization.

From the SEO perspective, a mobile page is a small page filled with keywords and links back to the main site. It's a cheap way of building inbound links.

Best of all, building a mobile site is white hat seo marketing. The mobi developer isn't just creating pages for keywords. The mobi developer is creating pages to fit the unique needs of the smart phone market.

I started this MOBI project after using mobile.twitter.com on a smartphone. I found jumping from twitter to my blog was a bad user experience.

The Mobile Link allows me to put a mobile optimized page between twitter and my content. Using mlnk.us as the URL shortener will give smartphone users a chance to go to the mobi optimized page or to the full blown version.

There is one big hassle involved in this project. Because I now need to create two pages for each content page, I am forced to do a little dance where I jump between screens creating content on two web sites.

Here's the Mobi summary of this page. When that is done, I need to create the mlnk.us page. This is a difficult dance as I do not know the URLs until after I save the pages.

mlnk program

I am happy to announce a new domain in the Community Color family. I bought the domain mlnk.us for use as a URL shortener.

I intend to create a URL shortener with a twist.

As mentioned in previous posts, I bought a smartphone and started working on a mobile version of Community Color. I intend to create mobile versions of other sites.

The mobile versions will mirror the full HTML versions of the sites.

When I add content to a site, it will show up on both an HTML page and a mobile page!

The typical URL shortener redirects a user to a destination web page. The mlnk.us URL shortener will present a MOBI optimized page with links to both the HTML and Mobile page.

This design will make web browsing more pleasant for people twittering away their day on a smartphone (or people twittering in a small window).

Step one was to buy the domain. Step two is to design the site. Speaking of design, I decided to give my mobile pages a different background.

PS, I wrote this post before writing the program, so that I will have something to link to.