“Why aren’t there more photos on my mobile site? Can’t we have interactive Google Maps on my mobile site?”

Your mobile site should be designed to be as usable as possible – it’s for people that are in the destination, not for people planning to visit your destination (that’s what your “normal” mobile site is for).

Because of the poor quality and slow speeds of mobile networks around the United States (and generally elsewhere), your primary design consideration must be getting data to users as quick as possible, and this means keeping things as small as possible by cutting out everything but the most critical data.

A secondary but important criteria is making sure your site runs on as many types of phones as possible, which means avoiding using advanced features of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This need will fade over the next few years as greater numbers of people transition from simple feature phones to advanced smartphones.

Finally: as a rule of thumb, if your mobile site “looks amazing” on a normal desktop browser, it’s probably a lousy mobile site.