A Good Mobile Wordpress Solution

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A Good Mobile Wordpress Solution

Posted on 25 July 2009 by Jim Atwood Comments

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This past week I’ve been researching mobile solutions for my new http://jimatwood.mobi domain. I found two popular solutions of which one worked very well for me. The first idea was to go with mobify.com. I tried out their website development tools and either I’m just not getting it or I’m too much of a programmer to wrap my head around it. I just found mobify too time consuming to get my site working in basic mobile fashion. I then took a week off and then later after some additional research stumbled upon the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack which was recently released. Today I installed Wordpress 2.8.2 on jimatwood.mobi and then installed the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack 1.1.1 plugin. After about 30 minutes of painless installation, I had a complete working mobile site up and running rather quickly.

Indeed if you check the site it is basic, but I think that’s what mobile sites should be at least in the beginning. Once I know something is working I can then later add more elements when needed. The following widgets/plugins were added to my site for extended functionality.

1. Recent Posts
2. Mobile Barcode
3. Mobile Access Keys
4. Mobile Google XML Sitemaps
5. Akismet
6. XHTML and Mobile YouTube

I also then tweaked the CSS to add the Orange color to the links and to change the font type in the title. I uploaded an image to the gallery and adjusted the settings for mobile output. So far I can view videos, photographs, comments, and of course posts or dedicated pages on my mobile phone. When checking for errors at ready.mobi, my site gives me a rating of 5 which is the highest. I only get one warning regarding “Incorrect or missing MIME types were detected”. I currently have a post on MobiForge which I hope gets answered. I’ll post those findings shortly. This is just a warning though and it shouldn’t cause any problems on phones.

Also, with regards to my .mobi site I have elected to have it completely in mobile format and will have no desktop version attached. So if you check out the site you’ll notice right away it’s in mobile format. This is actually common in Japan where I am currently residing. The Japanese like to make things simple and have two sites. This avoids the browser detection problems that everyone has all the time. With just one dedicated mobile site, things are much easier. In some cases, Japanese website only one version and that is mobile. In my opinion, mobile usage for the Internet is much more prevalent in Japan.

Stay tuned for additional updates as I continue to work and update my Wordpress mobile website.

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Tags: dotMobi, iphone, Japan, Jim Atwood, mobi, mobify, Mobile, nokia, phone, website, Wordpress

James Pearce

Hi Jim - glad you like the plugin. Any feedback or suggestions, let us know ;-)

http://www.assembla.com/spaces/wordpress-mobile-pack

All the best.

Jim Atwood

Thank you James. Yes the plugin is awesome. What I like most is how easy it is to install, setup, and get running. This gives me more time to add content and/or customize things. I did try other solutions available for Wordpress, but in the end I chose the Mobile Pack simply because it had me up and running in about a minute.

Holly Kolman

Jim, I've never been to Japan, but I've been told that they are quite advanced in terms of mobile web. It is interesting to see how the Japanese avoid the autodetection problem by making two sites, as you've done with your .mobi. I hope you will take me up on my offer to be a guest author on http://mobienthusiast.mobi - I think it would open a lot of peoples' eyes.

All the Best,
Holly

Jim Atwood

Most Japanese websites that I've seen indeed usually have two versions. It is also quite possible that the Japanese do have some sort of "excellent" method for browser detection. I am not sure about that. What I find advanced about it are several things, for example they seem to deploy effect Shift-JIS mobile sites which is important because that is the only "real" character set that the Japanese use here. UTF-8 and EUC-JP are just not that popular although they are used depending on the website solution. Another advanced concept is eCommerce. This is huge in Japan and everybody interested in a mobile website here in Japan seems to want a shopping system built. Although professional companies in Japan do custom coding, many small business are desperate for a Japanese Mobile eCommerce solution. There is a lot of money to be made in this area, but few if any solutions available.

A wordpress, mobile, and ecommerce solution may be the ticket since all three would be easier to code in Shift-JIS. I am currently testing the possibilities. Another advancement is in Social networking with the phone. Sites such as mixi.jp and gree.jp are booming. Although you can register with a desktop, you MUST have a mobile to complete the registration. This is one of the reasons why Japanese websites have a high rate of mobile users....they don't allow registrations without a mobile phone. Many reports seem to neglect this point. In any event, Mobile is big in Japan of course, but the real mystery is how well the iPhone/Android concept will fair and what their response will be.

Jim Atwood

Another quick point. The .mobi domain is really not that popular in Japan. Most people use .com or .jp for their domains. Businesses use .co.jp or .net.jp as well. Even today, I think you can get a lot of Japanese website company names in .mobi. Although I like .mobi, I personally think .jp is best in Japan because the extension is short.