While on vacation, I used my phone for surfing the web. Each morning I check the weather, the news, stuff like that.  While away, I used my phone to do this.

So let's compare two news sites: The Washington Post and CNN, regular formats, and the Post and CNN, mobile formats.

NOTE: Yes, the Post is a newspaper while CNN is a cable news channel, so the comparison isn't absolutely perfect. But it's pretty good.

Point #1: The URLs

CNN has a short URL to start with, while the Post has a long URL.  Typing in a URL (or really, typing anything) on a phone is a big huge pain in the rear, with those tiny little keyboards and doing it with your thumbs.  (Plus I still don't know how to get a semicolon on my phone, and routinely have to hunt for slashes, colons, and whatnot.)  

But even so, it's mobile.washingtonpost.com vs. m.cnn.com. Which would you rather type?  

Point #2: Design: branding

The idea of a mobile phone site is that it should be designed to fit into a tiny screen, whos dimensions could vary quite widely.  Also, as many people are on a phone plan that limits the amount of data that can be downloaded, you need to make every byte count.

So -- we go back to our Lynx days on the web, and think about how to design a site with as small a file size as possible.

Gone are photos, decorative elements, etc. News sites are all about the headlines, and both the Post and CNN do a good job of presenting these.  They both keep their logos at the top, as they should -- if you can only keep a few branding elements, the logo is the one to keep. But CNN's does a nice job of incorporating "mobile" into their logo, while the Post's logo is the same as on their regular site.

Both sites visually resemble the main sites.  CNN has red and grey, while the Post has a dark blue and white theme.

However, the Post uses these heavy dark blue bars  to break the page up into its various sections (Opinions, Nation, Politics, World, etc).  CNN uses capitalized titles with thin grey lines to accomplish the same thing -- and it's much less harsh to my eye.

The red bullets on the CNN site are classier than the hyphens before the articles on the Post site.  Small style element, but big impact on a simple design like this.

Point #3: Drilldown

I usually read the Post in the morning, and sometimes I read Carolyn Hax, the advice columnist.  (It's nice to know that some people have problems bigger than my own!!!)

But I can't get to her from the mobile site, although I can get to her from the home page of the Post site normally.

It would seem to me that if it's accessible from the home page (and I mean the home page content area, not necessarily the top nav or whatnot), you should be able to access it on the phone site eventually.  It might take 25 clicks, but you should be able to get there.  However, on the Post site, you just hit a brick wall after a while.

 It seems with CNN, there is a ton of content from other sources (for example, Time, Oprah Magazine, etc).  When you get down to the original CNN content (or what I identify as such), you can find it on both sites.  The mobile site doesn't contain the other source content, nor does it have the ads. 

Point #4: Simplicity

Which leads into an interesting comparison. Go to a news site. Strip out all of the news that isn't original to the publication. Strip out the ads and sponsored links. Take out the logos and videos and stock quotes. What's left?...  well, pretty much what's on the mobile site, for the most part, with CNN.  With the Post, it's a little less than that.