It’s yourself that you hurt when you make fundamental website mistakes. And one of the areas that people are tripping up the most is on the mobile web.

There was another post in the queue for this week, but I had to move it after running into a slew of sites that made some basic errors that made it almost impossible to link to them because I knew the that people on the other end were going to have a bad experience.

I’m not going to publicly excoriate these guys.. but they’re major agencies and companies that have the budgets to know better that are making this crucial mistake.

This week, we’re going to kick off the series with the first of three critical mobile site mistakes.. The walkabout link.

The Walkabout Link

You receive a link in email on your iPhone, Android, iPad or other mobile device to a deal. Or a press information. Or whatever. You click it. And then end up on their.. home page?

Many poor implementations of mobile sites will redirect any page that isn’t in the mobile site tree to the home page. This is a critical mistake, because people want to go where the link is advertised to take them. Users get frustrated and leave in this scenario, and there’s also a high probably a savvy content person isn’t going to share your link because they know their mobile audience can’t see it.

The solution: Every link on your site, if you’re going to have a mobile version, should auto-detect that it’s being used by a mobile device and reformat the content with the same URL. Also, at the bottom of the page, the user should have the ability to turn off said mobile formatting. In almost all cases, there should not be a separate setup for mobile sites. At the very least, let people see the regular sized page and give them the content they were expecting.

Stop by next week for part two of mobile site madness. Your users will thank you, and so will your pocketbook.