Why Millions of WordPress Bloggers Need to get Mobile Friendly
Posted by Rich Gubby on June 3, 2009 at 5:54 pmFiled under: Mobile Internet, Mobile Plugins, Mobile Web Design, Mobile Websites, Wordpress Mobile
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years and have never heard of WordPress, it’s a free to use, open source publishing system.
It’s one of the biggest and best around, with over 5,000,000 people publishing hosted blogs on wordpress.com and millions more using software they’ve downloaded from wordpress.org.
I’ve done a lot of research to discover that very few of these sites actually render well on mobile, here are a couple of screenshots of what a popular WordPress site looks on my Nokia N73:
http://ma.tt
As you can see it doesn’t look that great and is totally unreadable and usable on mobile. It also took 2-3 minutes to load and cost me a small fortune in data charges.
To start with, I’m not going to wait around for that site to load and I’m certainly not going to bother clicking on any other links to go through the whole process again.
Yet with 5% of web traffic now being generated by mobile devices, it’s imperative for any WordPress blogger to make their website mobile friendly. One where content fits perfectly on the screen, where pages take a few seconds to download yet retain the same structure and quality of graphics as the website no matter what mobile phone browser is being used to access it.
A plugin that Mobilizes WordPress Blogs in under 5 minutes
Being a mobile web dev expert, I decided to create a simple solution to the problem using Wapple Architect and WAPL. I’ve created a WordPress plugin and theme that’s completely free to use for the non-commercial blogger and will present content perfectly to every single device in the world. Here’s how this site looks on both web and mobile:
Mobile Web Junkie
My blog is now perfectly usable on web and mobile and can be read on thousands of devices from old WML browsers to swanky new ones such as the Google G1 and the iPhone. It also retains the same SEO as the web version and can be accessed via the same URL: http://mobilewebjunkie.com
If you want to find out exactly how I did it, have a read of “How I Mobilized WordPress – the Technical Howto for Devs, Coders, Web Geeks and Wizards“.
If you’re not that interested how it all works but want to mobilize your WordPress blog anyway, you can get the plugin now by heading over to the plugin homepage on wordpress.org and clicking the download button. Alternatively, if you search for “Wapple Architect” in the wordpress control panel, you can install it directly from there!
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June 4th, 2009 at 9:23 am
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