Mobile devices usage to increase, is your site ready?
Mike / January 23rd, 2010 / 3 Comments »According to latest analysis, there will be approximately a 9% increase in mobile phone sales in 2010. We can see people everyday in cafes, subways, in the streets checking their e-mail from their mobile phone. The world is moving faster and mobile phones make it easier to keep in touch with your friends, business partners and family.
Popular websites like Facebook, New York Times, Flickr, Mashable etc. have already setup the mobile versions of their websites, a clear vision of how the trend is going to be.
The mobile version of a website is not said to contain all the information and data your standard website has. You can limit it to show the most important things your visitors are interested in. If you are a news website, you can show your latest news, if a blog your blog posts, if an online store your products and so on. The important thing is that the mobile version of your website is simple, clean looking, very easy to navigate and that is coded by the standards needed for it to appear correctly in every device.
Looking at these developments we were also working on a mobile version for our own website, actually put it on hold for a bit due to the many projects we’re working on but hopefully we can soon retake working on it. In the meantime we decided to make our first test by releasing a mobile theme. In case you did not notice already, the Light Touch theme does come with a mobile version included.
The theme is very clean, easy to navigate and simple. It comes with a page only navigation, but you can use the blog page template and you can show your blog posts or latest news in a very elegant way. The theme was created to allow you setup the mobile version very quickly in two ways; in the same wordpress installation using a theme switcher plugin, or in another domain or subdomain.
If you choose to set it up in the same installation you will avoid having to update two different websites. Inside the theme package there are clear instructions on how to set it up either way.
On the other hand we do provide also custom services, so you can contact us if you want our help in designing a mobile version of your existing site.
Do you think this is a feature that you would provide for all your themes? If so, then if I purchased your ‘Space Color’ today, would I be able to get the upgrade with the mobile version when it was available?
The mobile version is a great selling point.
It’s something we are considering. Of course if we make the mobile version of a certain theme, all those who did purchase that theme would get the mobile version for free
I’ve found a lot of new clients by showing them how bad their website looks on my mobile device (a Blackberry in this case). I’m surprised at how many website design companies are not offering this simple solution to their clients.