To little fanfare this week, SEPTA unveiled their new mobile site. Most of the little fanfare is due to the fact that the site is clearly nowhere near finished.
There's a lot more to making a mobile site than simply reducing your real site to thumb-sized. When you open it on an iPhone, the screen is super-scaled down. Links are close together, and therefore hard to tap. TrainView is the same massively wide view you get on the desktop and requires lots of scrolling. A little bit of styling can go a long way.
Please, SEPTA. Finish your products before you release them. I know you want to make them grow based on how people receive and use them, and I know the excitement of launching something new, but this just makes you look sloppy. This is the web equivalent of doing your first passenger run of Silverliner V cars when they're still filled with sand bags.
Before you release, make it feature complete. Where are the other schedules? The mobile site is great if you're taking a train, but useless if you're on a bus, subway, or trolley. Put some styling on the site (take a look at iSepta), because most of us are going to be looking at this on iPhones, Androids and BlackBerrys, not on flip phones. Put in something to wow us, like an integration between TrainView and Google Maps.
Release it once, and make it good. Don't release an incomplete site just to say you released it.