Mobile News Sites - The Times
By @edent
· guardian news times · 700 words
I read most of my news through my mobile - if your website isn't mobile friendly, I won't be bothered to read it. I've greatly enjoyed the BBC's Mobile News service and Guardian Mobile - but now there's a new player - The Times has a mobile site. This is a quick review of what I like and what I dislike about The Times' mobile venture.
Discovery
The first I knew of the site was this advert nestled away on their website.
No mention of the URL on the advert
The URL is the rather tautological http://timesmobile.mobi/
Good: Using a .mobi to indicate it is a mobile friendly site Bad: Not autodetecting my phone and redirecting me to the .mobi site.
Page Layout
A nice clean front page.
The Times - Mobile Front Page
The logos are, to my mind, too large - they dominate the page whereas they should be subtle enough to be useful. The adverts predominantly for The Times' own services.
Big Images
Stories are well laid out, although the images could be shrunk for a mobile audience.
Stories are split over several pages - helps with download speeds and also boosts page impressions.
Next and Previous page links
Sharing
Unbelievably, there's no way to share stories. There's no send to a friend link and, worst still, the URLs are too long to send in an SMS. I also suspect they contain session keys.
What a long URL
Compare this to The Guardian...
At the bottom of each Guardian story
Text to a friend
...or the New York Times...
The New York Times has a range of sharing option
Send to a friend
How do you expect to build readership if your current readers can't tell their friends about your great content?
Customisation
This is one area where The Times outshines the competition. At the bottom of the front page is the invitation to customise the page.
Customise
This is a boon for people like me with no interest in sports. Here are my customisations...
All the different sections
...And the resultant section on the front page.
My Front Page
Search
The Times' search functionality is curious. The input field is too narrow and the buttons are poorly placed.
Wherefore art thou, Shakespeare (yes, I know wherefore means why)
It also provides mobile friendly web searches - although the order seems rather spurious.
Random mobile results
Feedback
The site asks for feedback - curiously, they don't link to their mobile Twitter page. Again, their text fields are far too narrow.
Why does The Times hate hyperlinks?
RSS
They seem to offer mobile friendly RSS feeds, a great way for keeping people up to date with the site.
Mobile friendly RSS
Yet, for some reason, the link isn't clickable.
Conclusion
This has some awesome features - I love the customisable homepage, especially the keyword search.
There are some minor UI niggles which will no doubt be ironed out over time.
The lack of sharing is a severe mistake - without an easy way to send stories to people, you can't hope to organically drive traffic.
I look forward to more British news sites going mobile.
Post Script
The Times wish it to be known that...
we were mobile-friendly long before Guardian
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