Disagree. Content should be well written. Period. Well written includes being as brief, clear and engaging as possible. A novel is not long because books are big. It is long because telling rich, rollicking and intricate stories takes time. The discovery and evolution of each character and the story is part of that experience. Should it be cut down for Kindle readers? 

We, as web pro’s, need to embrace the horror – we let too many words trample our sites. It has been a gradual creep that began in our infancy, just over a decade ago… Write well. Deliver to all. Your story doesn’t change because of an iphone or a dell or a kindle or any other device.

At that point business might have to eat the cost of a separate mobile site. Just to keep the website visitors from leaving and never coming back because of all the ads. A 60×60 ad isn’t that big on a 17″ screen, but on a 4″ screen, that’s all you’ll see.

I bet that you spent some time to think about how it will look on a small screen. 

So while I agree that the content should be the same. But I also think it should be different in the same time. A crazy idea and hard to do…

Nielsen has articles on this matter to where he explains in more details how it can be done:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-content.html 

Defer Secondary Content When Writing for Mobile UsersSummary: Mobile devices require a tight focus in content presentation, with the first screen limited to only the most essential information.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-writing.html 

Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out

Summary: Writing for mobile readers requires even harsher editing than writing for the Web. Mobile use implies less patience for filler copy.

This is by far the most insightful article I’ve found, and it’s put me at ease a bit so thanks for posting this!

I’ve been writing a four part mini-blog series about this problem for the past four months. Paul, thank you for giving me the final incentive I needed to contribute my thoughts on the matter. 

Intro: http://www.16toads.com/projects/offense/

Part 1: http://www.16toads.com//journal/comments/passionate_sanctimony_part_1_the_art_of_bullying

Let’s keep the conversation going.

For example a local restaurant may have a fancy website, heavily flash based, but it looks great on a PC, and it costs them a lot of money. It would be easier to simply redevelop the entire site from scratch, in a responsive design but in keeping with the current look and feel of the corporate branding. In essence you’re re-building the entire site, and making the additional tweaks for the resizing/responsive aspects. And lets face it, there are always little niggling problems and issues which adds up and eats into the time spent on development.

That above sounds like a pretty costly exercise. In essence, a brand new site build and the cost that entails. And bare in mind, these guys have spent a lot of their current, insuffient website a few years earlier.

However if you instead provide a mobile website specifically for which there are many “skeleton models” available, onto which you just add in the branding and the page content needed. Whilst this is still a new site build, it’s only a smaller website and will take a fraction of the time. OK, you may not be able to charge as much to the client, but they maybe more affordable for more small businesses. And they may always come back to you in future for changes and maintainence.

It gets a little more complex if there is dynamic content within the websites, or your client has a CMS. But there are workarounds for this on a separate mobile website.

What I think I’m saying is that for clients with existing websites, an easy solution is a simple, small and quickly built mobile sub-site. For a brand new business, or one without a website in place, it would be good practice to give them a responsive website to fit all devices. And for those companies needing complex features or who are large organisations, it’s a case of Nielson’s cost-benefit analysis.

I don’t think he honestly believes that. Otherwise he’d have stopped doing research by now and just rehash previous findings from similar studies with his new clients. And we get permission to be flexible within our own context with lines like “…if that’s true for you, then do go that route.”

But he’s a pre-web researcher who works with big clients with deep pockets. Compared to those of us who either cut our professional teeth on the web or have learned to embrace the culture of the web Jakob’s methods are more formal (although not necessarily more academic) and less open or transparent than we are accustomed to. Then he presents his findings with a sort of old-school authority that I’m sure keeps many of his clients happy. But without being able to look at his data or his research methods ourselves
his appeal to authority comes off sounding, like, just his opinion,
man. And Jakob doesn’t have the necessary flair to build a cult of personality like Jeffrey Zeldman or Jared Spool or Paul Boag (or The Dude).

Much like the design of his website, Jakob’s got presentation issues. But the core content is often pretty good. Personally I don’t think the modern UX movement as we know it today would exist without his body of work.

All this is measured against our current idea of mobile users as some sort of distinct and homogenous group. When it comes to the web, a ‘mobile user’ is simply someone who happens to not be in front of a computer (and even that is increasingly untrue as surveys increasingly reveal long or frequent periods of personal device use at the office…not to mention the wide use of mobile devices in the home….it’s amazing to see people surf for 5-10 minutes on a small screen, while their PC is right in front of them…)

We need to get into the habit of challenging all assumptions around how stuff currently works or we’ll end up like the newspaper and publishing industries…bogged down by tools, processes and overhead that prevent true progress.

Note that I’m conveniently not commenting on Jakob’s conclusions or yours as the situation is currently all over the place. Content can just as often conspire against responsive design (rencent conversations with financial services, health care and government clients come to mind…poor structure, hard coded styles, overtly lengthy content that can’t be reduced without costly and time consuming legal oversight etc.)

My best suggestion lately is to (if possible/practical) implement a separate site, but make that site responsive and use it as a giant A/B test enabling you to slowly streamline content, determine what can be trimmed and how to simplify interactions for *all* users, not just the mobile ones. All this with an eventual plan of ditching one of the sites, but doing so once traffic, user behaviour and content goals are far easier to define than they are today. :-)

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Needless to say – showing some form of approach will show the ICO that your working towards compliance.  Having a prominent Cookie policy should be taken as read.

As stated in this post, I also mostly aggree with Nielsen. The biggest thing is that, conent sould be optimized for different devices.
On the other hand, this doesn’t have to be done with seperate mobile say, for example. A clever developer, teamed up with a great designer, can do many things right. 
Also, the user inteface can be optimized for different devices, things can shown, or hidden, different navigation may be displayed on a iPhone and a tablet.
I think that the path is actually somewhere here, where new technology allows us to do great things on many devices.

Cheers,
edi