If you’re managing a large site, building the WAP version of your site in a completely isolated environment is an appealing idea. It’s a business experiment, it doesn’t impact the daily site or put it at any risk, and it’s a quick way to get it up and running. This worked extremely well when I built the mobile site for a large news agency — News agencies are in the business of syndication, so they make their data extremely accessible. One of their web developers put it: You turn the tap on, and news is supposed to flow out.
So we launched our mobile news site, it was a huge success, and traffic started flowing in. Eventually, though, we started getting a few complaints that went like this: People were emailing articles to each-other from the web, and when they tried to click the link on their BlackBerries, they were redirected to the front page of the mobile site! They’d get a link from their friend, to:
news-site.com/article/25798470
And when they hit the link on their phone, they’d be detected as mobile and redirected to:
mobile.news-site.com
Not good! The same thing was also happening from users’ RSS readers. We did eventually fix this, but we had to set up some crazy redirects to take care of it (and unify some back-end data more tightly, so we could refer to the same article IDs).
The much cleaner approach would have been an integrated one, that (assuming a MVC model) simply displayed a different View while using the same Model/Controller.
A huge part of WAP consulting these days lies around ‘making the mobile version of my site.’ This is a great way to get things going quickly, but please do this with an eye toward eventually providing airtight site integration!