My website will revert visitors to a seperate mobile site, this seems fairly simple after reading a few guides online.
However, I would like people to be able to click a link on the mobile site which will then take them to the desktop site.
The problem I see is that if I link back to the desktop site it will just redirect them back if they are on mobile?
How can I get around this?
You can use Cookies, Session or Local Storage such that when a user clicks on "go to desktop site", it sets a value.
Let's say you set the name to be "mobileOff" and the value set to "1" or "true" when a user on a mobile phone clicks on "Go to Desktop Site". Then, wherever you're doing your mobile check, add a conditional to check for the mobileOff in the user's cookie/session/localStorage, if it's set to true, bypass the automatic mobile redirect, otherwise, load the main desktop site.
you should combine user agent method to detect device clubbed with query string to this sort of functionality. so lets assume your link is
site/default.aspx
if some one hits this page check the user agent and give in the response the appropriate site or event better if the device detected if a mobile device simply redirect to m.yourdomain.com/site/default.aspx
but if some one hits the page site/default.aspx?type=desktop then override the behaviour of checking the useragent and render the desktop site.
never ever you should first load the desktop site and then via javascript reditect to a mobile site. do this using user agents server side.