Have you looked at your web site on you tablet or mobile phone and wondered how you could get it to display differently so it was easier to use by the visitor? Are you finding your analytics reports showing an increase in web traffic via mobile but your bounce rate is higher than non mobile traffic? You’re not alone and it’s likely one of the next requirements that web designers are going to be asked to include in building or fixing a web site is including a mobile version.
Today’s mobile themes are now designed in a process called “responsive design”. Responsive design uses a css technique called media queries. Media queries scale an image and content block by a percentage of the height and width rather than a fixed size. This allows the same web site to automatically scale to display correctly on the many different size monitors and devices such as smart phone and tablet. This means one set of coding instructions works for all size monitors and mobile devices. That’s today and tomorrow’s web site software technology.
In the past, designers built mobile sites using plugins. The plugins for mobile require you to build a different theme for your different mobile devices which can be a bit time consuming. One of the better plugins is by Ithemes called Mobile. To use this plugin to build a mobile site, you build different themes for the different sized devices and the plugin detects the device accessing the web site and displays the correctly sized theme. The theme is designed to show your sidebars or not to show your sidebars and just where to display your images and links relative to the content text. You can see that to implement mobile in this way is rather time consuming.
A better solution is to upgrade your web site theme to one that uses responsive design so you are ready to compete in the next wave in technology, the wave of the mobile platform of smart phones, tablets and ____ you fill in the blank because tomorrow will offer us something new.
My next post will discuss the concept of premium theme frameworks and why they are a cost savings to you even though they are not a free theme.
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