Creating a blog that’s optimised for mobile
As well as setting up a new office (at the beautiful Grade II listed Wool Hall building in Bristol) I’ve been spending the first few weeks of January doing the new year thing – reviewing my systems, upgrading my blogging tools and prepping for the year ahead. If you’re still in this mode and need a checklist, check out ReadWriteWeb’s 8 Things Every Geek Needs To Do Before 2010.
High on my list was getting my blog optimised for mobile. During 2009 I noticed my own behaviour changed pretty radically. I got an iPhone 3GS in 2009 and I now find I access the web at least as much via mobile as I do via computer. The iPhone has a great browser, but my blogs were not optimised for web access.
This blog is built on the WordPress platform, so, I’m experimenting with one of the most popular mobile plugins, WordPress Mobile Pack. My initial thoughts are that this plugin works really well. It’s very easy to set up – just download from the plugin directory and drag the folder to your Plugins folder. You can then set the look via the Switcher and Theme settings in the back end of the blog.
Now when I view this blog on my iPhone 3GS, it looks like this:
I haven’t tried it on any other mobile operating systems yet, so please let me know if you’re accessing this site by mobile and what kind of experience you’re having.
The only problem I’m experiencing is that the site is still scoring badly on mobiReady. The authors of the plugin say that ‘All mark-up is valid XHTML-MP 1 and the site scores 5 on mobiReady…’ but I’m getting a score of 2 and a message that says ‘It will probably display very poorly on a mobile phone.’ I’m looking into this and will post in the comments when I find the solution. If any body has any ideas, please leave a message in the comments below.