11 Excellent Solutions for Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
It seems that almost everybody has a cell phone these days, and with the growing adoption of smart phones, more and more people are browsing the internet on their mobile device. Even though some phones, like the iPhone, have browsers that make viewing regular webpages suitable, a mobile version of your website can mean several benefits, like faster load times, and ensuring your content can be viewed on a wider range of phones.
Creating a mobile version of WDL has been on my to-do list for a while now, but yet there is still no mobile version of this site. Sensing that I’ve been putting it off for far too long, I’ve started to do research on the best mobile solution for Web Design Ledger. I’ve found that there are a number of solutions out there that make it easy to go mobile with your website, but here are eleven of the best.
WPtouch
WPtouch is a mobile theme for your WordPress website. Modeled after Apple’s app store design specs, it loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.
MoFuse
MoFuse is currently being used by over 23,000 blogs for their mobile versions. Some notable “big-name” sites are Mashable and Read Write Web. MoFuse gives you tools to promote your content, build and measure your audience, and even make money.
Mippin Mobilizer
Mippin Mobilizer helps you get your site mobilized in just a few quick steps, and give you full control over the branding and logo. It also give you the ability to monetize your mobile site through advertising.
Mobify
Mobify gives you full control over the layout of your mobile site with CSS, and it supports over 5000 mobile devices. It also gives you tools to manage mobile advertising and analytics.
Wirenode
Wirenode currently hosts nearly 40,000 mobile webpages, and include in those are some popular brands like Reebok and Ford. With Wirenode it takes about 5 minutes to get a mobile version of your site up and running, and it gives you features like mobile widgets, RSS mobilization, and mobile polls and forms.
WPtap
WPtap delivers mobile themes/plugins that can instantly convert your WordPress site into web-application experience when viewed from iPhone, iPod Touch, touch-based Blackberry, and Android smartphones. WPtap offers comprehensive mobile theme solutions for your WordPress website. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtap also offers many customization features through a user-friendly WordPress admin panel.
mobiSiteGalore
mobiSiteGalore is a mobile website builder that allows you to easily build, publish & share a full-fledged mobile website that is guaranteed to work fine on any mobile phone. Design templates allow you to completely customize the colors, fonts and layout on the page to create a unique looking mobile version of your website.
WordPress Mobile Pack
The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.
Zinadoo
Zinadoo is a web solution that allows you to create a mobile version of your website in just a few minutes. You can also optimize your site for Google Mobile with keywords and tags, and make use of their special mobile widgets.
Winksite
Winksite was the first standards-compliant mobile Website builder that included RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such as forum, chat, and polls. It also allows you to monetize your mobile site with advertising from leading advertising networks. Your revenue share is 100%. Winksite does not take a share of the revenue that your mobile site generates.
MobilePress
MobilePress is a free WordPress plugin which turns your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on a cell phone. MobilePress also allows you to create custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Opera Mini and Windows Mobile.
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32 comments
mvhoute
May 12, 2010I’m missing http://www.osmobi.com/ in this list.
Ravikumar V.
May 12, 2010superb article
twapt
May 12, 2010Thanks for sharing, yes i like WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog.
twapt.net is tools for mobile form builder.
Rob T
May 12, 2010Thx for the article. I’m going to look more into WP touch.
Narga
May 12, 2010I’ve wrote another solution here
http://www.narga.net/make-convert-website-friendly-portable-mobile-devices/
Niubi
May 12, 2010Thanks so much for this list! Does anyone know which app would work best for DubLi?
Martin
May 12, 2010i think WPtouch/WPtap will dominate
greven
May 12, 2010WP Touch looks awesome. Just tried it on my new project, and it works great! With a little customization, it’s ace!
Website Design
May 12, 2010I’ve been doing some research into how to automate mobile site creation…
Thanks – got a few more ideas from your post
Stacy
May 12, 2010Thank you for putting this list together. Very useful information!
Pink Parachuters
May 12, 2010Great list! So many options, which one will be best?
Chris Mower
May 12, 2010I was using WPTouch a while back (maybe a year ago) on my cooking site, but it ended up conflicting with another pluging. I’m sure that’s resolved by now, so I’ll have to look into using a mobile-friendly plugin again.
Nigel
May 12, 2010I’m surprised wapple isn’t in the list. Very impressed by their plugin and service plus they appear to work with some major brands.
Greg Babula
May 12, 2010WPTouch sounds great
Alan
May 13, 2010WP Touch seems the way ahead for me, just need to get my blog up and running.
The Longest Way Home - Travel & Photography
May 13, 2010Lot’s new plugins here. BUT …
I’d like an article that will tell me if they are compatible with caching plugins!
It’s taken months of grind to find out there are faults on many of these. From simply not working, to creating duplicate content!
Tim McLeod
May 13, 2010Yes! WDL Mobile!
Henry
May 15, 2010Yes, I know. It’s long overdue.
Tiziano
May 14, 2010Good article. Thanks
Look Sharp Designs
May 14, 2010Good article. Reading it on a Palm Pre (WebOS) phone. Too bad this site doesn’t support a mobile version for it.
Jose
May 25, 2010Does anyone know of a plug in for blogspot templates? I love how the wordpress sites render on an iphone!
Nedra Jacek
June 7, 2010I am having problem with the first link. It gives a 404 error?
Thanks
AJ
June 14, 2010I have a flash website and would like to advice on which service is best for making site mobile ready without redesigning the site. Thanks
EddieZ
June 17, 2010I also wanted to ask the same question AJ.
Is there a solution if you have flash type setup?
Or should one just stay away from flash for that reason? Thanks for your time anybody
Helena
June 29, 2010I think many companies just don’t notice yet how important mobile website is for their business. However, I’m sure that thanks to great services mentioned also the awareness is spread.
I’d also add Moogo (http://www.moogo.com) to the list. Although it doesn’t allow you to create a mobile site out of already existing website, it does allow you to create a website from scratch that also looks good with a mobile phone. The best feature is that you can also choose which parts of your website are visible with a mobile phone and which aren’t. E.g. I think it’s wise to disable heavy photos and videos on mobile site.
If you want to know more about the topic, check out a video blog entry: http://www.moogo.com/blog/2010/06/24/111
Frederick Allen
July 14, 2010I don’t see Unity Mobile on the list. I’ve been using Unity Mobile for all my mobile sites. It’s like a one stop mobile spot, they offer SMS tools, QR Code image, web site importer… everything. You can even turn your mobile site into an app that works on all phones.
http://unitymobile.com
Jeremy Stevens
August 18, 2011Smartviso should be on this list… probably first. I’ve tried a few that you mentioned and this seems to be the better of the bunch. Not perfect, but it makes way better sites and gives more flexibility.
Tony Marshall
August 27, 2011Hi Henry,
Nice article. I’d be interested to know which systems people think are “best”. Keeping the same url and loading different templates dependent upon the user agent OR redirecting to a different domain.
I guess the former has the advantage of it’s all on one domain – but I’m not sure how much of a real advantage that is. Some providers make a big thing that it’s better for SEO, but I’m not convinced by that. You want your mobile pages to rank in google’s mobile search imdex not the main index and I’m not sure how they achieve that when javascript is involved.
Ultimately I suspect you pays your money and makes your choice – there are pros and cons of both methods and an in-depth critique is probably a topic for separate article.
I think most readers here will be convinced we need to educate and prod website owners to get mobile. We built a small tool to show website owners how their website is currently seen on a mobile phone. It’s free for anyone to use I hope it might be of use to you or your readers – http://www.sayuconnect.com/mobile_check.php
Tony
Vincent
December 22, 2011Awesome article.
Thanks Henry!
Ethan
January 3, 2012Great. Would love to have an updated list (including mwa.mobi, etc.)? Thanks again!
Chen Levkovich
February 24, 2012Try Zuznow – It will create a great looking mobile site from your desktop one, and will leverage your SEO and social network promotions
Matt
April 25, 2012Great list of mobile publishing vendors and I also like to add one more mobile website creation tool which also offers Free Hosted Mobile Website.
http://www.jaemobi.com/
Thanks,
Matt
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