Tablet pc and mobile phone access
Gone are the days when only desktops/laptops were used to view websites. With the proliferation of mobiles and high-end touch devices like the iPhone, iPad, Palm Pre, Android etc, users expect websites to be displayed in their devices, and rightly so, without the entire layout getting broken.
This is especially true in the case of old websites which are based on table layouts. Tables are often of fixed widths, but on smaller mobile screens, the content overflows the view area, and it is often a hassle for users to navigate the page. This doesn't indicate that div based layouts are automatically optimized for mobile view. However they are recommended for performance gains even for desktop sites.
Divs can be easily optimized for mobiles, where its often a matter of using a different stylesheet. The stylesheet is chosen depending upon the user-agent which requests the website. The mobile stylesheet will most importantly have fixed pixel widths converted to percentages, among other changes. This ensures that no matter what the client device is, layout will always fit accordingly to the screen.
Some other changes that are required for having mobile support are :-
- Content should be highly prioritized for mobiles. Users shouldn't be overwhelmed with too much navigation links, and avoidable pages.
- As many mobile devices don't support Javascript, it should be avoided.
- Only basic css formatting is recommended.
- There should be an option for users to switch to the desktop site.
- In the case of iPhone, there are certain meta tags which have to be included in the head section of the html,
e.g.<meta name = "viewport" content = "width = device-width">
Optimizing wordpress websites for mobile devices is easy due to the availability of many plugins. The plugins which are worth integrating to your wordpress installation are:
- WordPress Mobile Pack- This is a versatile plugin, which has many nifty features, some of them being -
1. A desktop switcher option in the mobile screen.
2. Automatic resizing of images, splitting of posts into different pages for readability.
3. Mobile Admin Panel when wordpress is accessed from a mobile.
4. Easy css customization, to achieve varied color schemes.
- WPTouch- It optimizes wordpress mainly for devices like the iPhone, Palm, Android, which have large screens. It uses the iPhone specific features such as hover, buttons, etc which would otherwise not work in low-end devices.
- MobilePress- This plugin allows the use of customized themes. Two types of custom themes are possible, one for iPhone, and another generic theme. MobilePress is also SEO enabled. Mobile visitor analytics can be tracked with the help of aduity.com which is integrated into this plugin.
- WordPress Mobile Edition- Mobile devices to be shown the mobile theme can be configured manually using this plugin. It provides progressive enhancement for advanced mobile devices. The theme is built using the popular Carrington Theme Framework.
WordPress Team
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