![]() ![]() There are many other plugins that will help with your WordPress mobile display, many of which use a third party service and some of which are premium. This looks completely different from the desktop version and is much easier to read on a mobile, if lacking some of the distinctive design. Stephen Fry's website, like millions of others, uses WPTouch, the most popular plugin for WordPress mobile display. If you've ever visited a site on your mobile that looks a bit like Figure 1, then you've seen mobile plugins in action. Plugins - the quick and dirty methodįigure 1: Stephen Fry's mobile website, created using WPTouch. Some of these solutions will involve responsive design, and creating different layouts from the same content via media queries, and some involve different, more old school methods (such as UA sniffing). This is normally done with UA sniffing, which can be fraught with problems, and less sites are using such functionality now that we have responsive design, but in some circumstances it could still be the best solution to consider Switchers: These identify when someone's visiting your site on a mobile device and change themes to a more appropriate one.This may be the simplest solution for a new site or one undergoing a redesign. Responsive themes: If you're looking for a theme for your site, whether free or premium, there is a growing number that are responsive.Plugins: There are a plethora of plugins, of varying quality, which will quickly and easily change the way your site looks for mobile visitors, solving your problem at a snip.With a WordPress site there are four main ways to make the site mobile-friendly: A site with a custom theme, branding, widgets and custom post types will be more complicated, but with responsive design and even with some plugins, not impossible, as I've discovered myself on sites I've developed. ![]() It all depends on the way your site is built: a simple site using standard blog posts and pages, with no widgets or custom post types, can be mobilised (if that's the right word!) in seconds with a plugin or a mobile theme. The results may be hit and miss - but they may be spot on. The good news is that if your site is "proudly powered by WordPress", this can actually be done in seconds. You might think that getting a site that's powered by a dirty great CMS like WordPress to go mobile will be more difficult, but as we shall see, that need not be the case. ![]() So are there alternatives? Breaking out the solutions If you're working with a CMS, especially if you're working with an off-the-shelf theme or a theme framework, that can seem difficult, if not downright impossible. In case you've been hiding under a bush for the past year or so, responsive design is all about using fluid layouts combined with CSS media queries to create websites that fit more naturally within the display of differently sized devices – this doesn't just apply to small screens, but for massive great ones too.īut responsive design requires control over the CSS, and a solid understanding of how the page is being laid out and built. The emerging favourite as a method for creating mobile sites is responsive design. For the actual examples I'll focus on the world's most popular blogging platform, Wordpress. But what about when you are working in a much more constrained environment, such as a CMS? In such circumstances it can be hard or impossible to build in such functionality, so often you'll have to rely on what's been made available via plugins or extensions to your CMS of choice.Īnd that's what this article is all about - below I'll outline some CMS-related issues and potential solutions. In addition, responsive design is pretty easy when you can control everything to do with the page - the markup structure, all the CSS, etc. It could also be that your client, boss or whoever is breathing down your neck and doesn't really "get" mobile, so at the moment you don't feel any pressure to do it. The main reason most of us aren't doing it is because it takes time and, sometimes, more budget. It seems that 2011 was the year in which great strides were made in terms of techniques for making websites render and perform better on mobile devices, but that 2012 will be the year when we all have to roll our sleeves up and get on with actually doing it.
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