I, like many people, browse the internet from my iphone. I spend most of my browsing time on my iphone, not on my desktop.
So many websites display the same, regardless of whether they are viewed on a desktop or mobile. I believe this is a mistake.
If you’ve never tried browsing the web on your mobile, you may not realize how annoying most layouts are. You have to zoom in to the content and sometimes turn your phone sideways because the text is too small.
Think about it for a minute – your site looks great on a big screen, but what if it were shrunk down to a quarter (or less!) of the size? Would it look as good? Would people still want to read your posts?
It’s just so easy to do a mobile enabled theme if you have a self-hosted wordpress website. Just install the free plugin “WP Touch” and do some basic configuration.
In your wordpress admin area, go to Plugins -> Add New and do a search for “WP Touch”. Or download it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
Install and activate it, then go to Settings -> WPTouch and choose your colours, homepage, language, etc.
I’ve tried this theme on an iphone and a nokia smartphone and the plugin says it also works for Android, Blackberry, Palm OS, etc. It also runs in English, French or Spanish.
There’s also a pro version available at Brave New Code (the makers of the plugin). I haven’t tried the pro version and right now I think all you need is the free version. Only get the pro version if you’ve been using the free one for a while.
The plugin produces a beautiful, app like interface. No strange scrolling, the text is the right size and it still displays pictures. It automatically detects that the visitor is on a mobile device and serves a specific theme to them. It doesn’t change your content, just the framework around it.
It doesn’t mess with your normal theme when viewed on desktops or laptops. On mobile devices, it puts a button on the bottom of every page that allows the user to turn off the mobile display if they choose. That reverts to the normal display.
In my opinion, every wordpress site should have the WP Touch plugin installed automatically. If you don’t have it installed, I can guarantee you’ll be turning some of your readers off. I’m a lot more likely to read all the content of a post if it’s on a mobile enabled site, but a non-mobile enabled site needs to do a LOT more to keep my attention because the browsing experience is so difficult. I’m sure I’m not unusual in this.
Why not view this site on your mobile device? I’d love to hear whether it works for you, particularly if you have a phone other than an iphone.
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