Using WordPress plugins to make your website mobile friendly

WordPress is a very popular PHP based Open Source blogging tool. By installing mobilizer plugins, your wordpress blog becomes mobile friendly, and all your earlier blog postings become ready to mobile-accessible with a minimum effort on your part. Below is amazing Plugins to view your WordPress Blog on any Mobile Device (iPhone, PDA…).

WordPress Mobile Pack

The dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog.

It has mobile recognition, device adaptation and it is widget ready. With the mobile recognition and device adaptation feature, it automatically re-sizes the images, split the articles or post into multiple pages such that your web page looks just fine on any of the mobile phones. It has a mobile admin panel so the admin of the site can easily manage it. Mobile ad widget allows mobile ads or mobile Adsense to displayed on the mobile version of the web pages.

MobilePress

MobilePress is a free WordPress plugin which turns your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on a cell phone. MobilePress also allows you to create custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Opera Mini and Windows Mobile.
You can set this plugin to display a specific theme for a specific device model or mobile browsers like the iPhone, Opera Mini, etc., such that your blog displays according to the device capability. This plugin also allows the WordPress theme developers to develop their own mobile themes for WordPress blogs.

Wapple Architect Mobile

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.

Wapple Architect Mobile plugin for WordPress

Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.

WPtouch: Mobile Plugin + Theme for WordPress

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.

Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

Wetomo WordPress to Mobile

Wetomo (Web to Mobile) is a service that allows publishers to display their existing web content to users on mobile phones and other handheld devices. This plugin detects when a user is on a mobile phone and automatically redirects them to Wetomo, which acts a a proxy between the mobile phone and the WordPress site and adapts the web site content to the mobile phone capabilities.

WP viewMobile

Mobile internet is irresistible. It is not only since Apple introduced its iPhone that people discover the pleasure of surfing the internet without being bound to their PC or Laptop. Unfortunately, many websites are not yet ready for visitors using mobile phones or other portable devices.

Mobify

This plugin detects mobile devices and sends them to the appropriate mobile URL. You must register for a free Mobify account in order to create and manage the mobile version.
Are you frustrated with the way your site looks on mobile? Join top-tier WordPress publishers like SitePoint that are powering mobile versions of their websites with Mobify. Mobify is a web service that makes it possible to customize every component of the mobile look & feel, adapting it for over 5,000 devices.

Kih is_mobile

You can use this plugin to detect whether a visitor on your web site is using a web browser on a mobile device. The plugin allows you to create additional profiles of mobile device web browsers that are not included in the default configuration of the plugin. It is useful for setting up different stylesheets for different types of mobile browsers thereby allowing you customization for the device or mobile phone user.

This article is the last in a series Make and convert any website that friendly Portable Devices, hope what I wrote useful for your work when build website mobile friendly.

Build mobile website

During construction, there are several unique issues for mobile devices is completely different from the normal computer.

Page sizes and images

Page sizes and images is one of the issues that need attention, even though current connection speed fast enough to able to view all video on the network but in the developing countries test loading a page> 100kb is not simple; your website for everyone, not just in some areas have not given?

Page sizes

In my experience you want your page size is less than 40kb.

Be careful with JavaScript, flash, video ....

Only little mobile browser support JavaScript such as BlackBerry Browser, IEMobile ... though it is not fully supported to be able to process them as the browser's computer and it similar to flash, video

Unsupported Technologies

Even JavaScript provided very limited work on the new mobile browser (BlackBerry Browser supports really good to handle tasks normally JavaScript) so you do not ever think to applying new technologies such as AJAX , playing video on your browser, use the flash without the assistance programs.

I know there are several solutions on mobile devices enabling the AJAX code through software complement, but not yet used any kind of formal all.

Small Screen Size

If you’ve ever tried to browse the Web on a handheld mobile device, your first thought was probably that the screen was incredibly small compared to your desktop or laptop.

BlackBerry 8700g with big screen

Some issues will be occur when displayed on small screen

• Websites which make use of tables for the main layout will not look right on mobile phones.
• It is difficult to enter text in mobile Web sites. You may want to offer your user the convenience of radio buttons and lists, which they can choose from depending on what they need.
• Horizontal scrolling is especially bad on the smaller cell phones will be appearing.

Things need to do when building a website for mobile devices

• Because mobile devices can not point as mouse on the computer so need to make shortcut to allow readers can quickly move between content.
• A good mobile Web site design provides back buttons and links. Many phones are not equipped with back buttons, so try to provide one.
• Your site must use CSS for the layout to make sure maximum compatibility. Because the different mobile phones have different screen sizes. This is a major headache if you want your mobile Web site design to run on all of them.
• It is difficult to enter text in mobile Web sites. You may want to offer your user the convenience of radio buttons and lists, which they can choose from depending on what they need.
• It is easiest if your site is coded using either XML or XHTML, with your character encoding set at UTF-8.
• Most of the mobile phone emulators do a good job at giving you an idea of how pages will look like. Use them to find major problems and test it.
• Integrated statistics feature is able to recognize your habit to use readers.

Take some time and invest in the creation of a small but efficient mobile website so you at least know you have another base covered in the realm of online marketing

Make WordPress Website Ready for Mobile

Characteristics of equipment is a small screen, processing capability and memory limitations. So by loading a complete webpage for desktop computers as a positive work overload for the device.
By converting your blog or website to a mobile version, you are sure of getting more visitors and be available for your readers even when they do not have access to a computer.

Below are few online services (third-party solutions) that will make this  creation or conversion easier than expected.

• Mippin provides a mobile publishing service named Mippin Maker. Using Mippin Maker you can convert your web site or blog into a Mippsite i.e. a mobile version of your site for free. Mippin also allows you to monetize your mobile site through advertisements from AdMob.
• Google’s Conversion Utility - This is as simple as it gets. Enter the URL of the website and check whether you want pictures included. Click Go and you now have a mobile-optimized version of the site!
• MobiSiteGalore - mobiSiteGalore allows you to easily build, publish & share a full-fledged mobile website that is guaranteed to work fine on any mobile phone. Let you build websites that will work consistently across all mobile phones as they 100% comply with W3C’s mobile web standards. You can host website wherever you want. This service is completely FREE and is supported by donations.
• FreeMobiz allows you to create a mobile compatible website of your own and make your presence felt on the new web - the mobile web. With three affordable packages, we provide options suitable for your budget (or even no budget) to get your mobile website up and running in no time. You can either have a free mobile website based on our URL or buy .mobi domains to directly access your mobile website.
• MoFuse - Use your RSS feed to power your mobile blog. Design your mobile blog with WYSIWYG editor. Automatically redirect your mobile visitors to your mobile blog. MoFuse allows for monetizing your mobile mofusewebsite with Google Adsense For Mobile and AdMob. The basic version is free and the Pro version costs $3 per month.
• Zinadoo - Using this web service you can easily create, publish and share you mobile website. Besides you can also colour the website, create a page that site visitors can email you from or request that you call/email them back, create a guestbook page, create a comments page and much more. Zinadoo's viral monetizing scheme first comes in with a pay-per-text service, which ended up a moot point as I didn't attempt to use my free credits for phones in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or the antipodes. Zinadoo craftily subtracted my free credit regardless.
• Winksite - Winksite is mobile Website builder that also includes RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such as forum, chat, and polls. The creation process is entirely handled online - there is no need to download or install any software application. Once a site has been created, it is possible monetize it via any of the several contextual advertisers on offer. You also monetize your website with Google Mobile Adsense.
• Mobify - Mobify is a free service that makes WordPress, Drupal and other websites mobile-friendly. Supports iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and 4500+ other devices. Through the UI, designers take care of the CSS, while the image resizing, content adaptation, mobile SEO, analytics are taken care of automatically. The site will reside on a URL like m.yoursite.com.

In my experience with these services, I found MoFuse, Mippin and Mobify to be very user friendly and the total process from signing up to conversion of your blog and website into a mobile site will not take more than 10 minutes. There are services using which you can create a new mobile site, convert your existing blog or website into a mobile site and earn money by monetizing your mobile site. Now getting hooked to your website or blog on mobile phone wont be that difficult.