If you are using a specific browser, say Safari, to visit a website like bbc.co.uk, you don't have to write safari.bbc.co.uk
in order for the website to be displayed in a Safari-optimised way, it usually just happens. So why should we have to guess the address when using a mobile browser?!

Is this even a problem?
If a website doesn't automatically detect a mobile device and deliver mobile content, the user will have to guess what the mobile address is, and there are quite a few options to be guessing from. Here are some using bbc.co.uk (which on a side note I think is doing a good job providing mobile content):

• m.bbc.co.uk (works)
• mobile.bbc.uk (works)
• wap.bbc.co.uk (doesn't work)
• iphone.bbc.co.uk (doesn't work)
• bbc.co.uk/m (doesn't work)
• bbc.co.uk/mobile (doesn't provide same content on phone as in regular browser)
• bbc.mobi (doesn't provide same content on phone as in regular browser)

But this requires the user to be familiar with the above concept which I doubt many users are. So already there we lose some of the users. Next, the size of the mobile page and the regular page are significantly different. This has an undesired impact on data traffic expenses as well as download speed. Finally some mobile phones are not too happy about all content delivered. An example is Flash which iPhone doesn't support.

Our investigation
After some investigation where we looked at websites registered at www.fdim.dk, the Danish Internet Media Organisation, we could clearly see a trend. The web developers would either:

• Not provide a mobile friendly website at all: 28%
• Provide a mobile website via a dedicated address similar to m.bbc.co.uk only: 55%
• Provide, or redirect the user directly to, a mobile website when visiting the regular address like bbc.co.uk: 17%

These numbers themselves do not reveal a problem. Perhaps it is not relevant with a mobile friendly version of a website, or the users may have grown accustomed to prefixing the address with an "m.". But digging into the gathered statistics reveals a difference. FDIM provides statistics on page views and visitors on both the regular webpages and some mobile friendly versions of the same webpages. Comparing these numbers with the information about whether or not a user would automatically get the mobile friendly webpage if using a mobile phone, we can derive following:

• Websites which provide, or redirect the user directly to, a mobile website when visiting the regular address similar to bbc.co.uk gets 3.47% visitors and 5.15% page views from mobile devices in average.
• Websites which do not automatically provide a mobile website will only get 1.51% visitors and 1.37% page views from mobile devices in average.

That is 2.3 times as many mobile visitors and 3.7 times as many mobile page views if we automatically redirect to or provide a mobile webpage!

Does this mean we should automatically redirect to a mobile friendly website if the user is using a mobile phone?
I strongly believe so. It is better usability and will make your users happy. However, we cannot be certain from these statistics that doing this will provide more users, only that more users will use the mobile webpages.