Tips on WordPress Development for Mobile Devices

Millions of people run WordPress blogs, which has a web management platform that is thorough and easy to use. However, the challenge comes when you want to post a blog using a mobile device such as an iPad or iPhone; their browsers can be a bit overcrowded or restrictive. For an iPad or iPhone, you can use WordPress for iOS when posting to WordPress blogs. It is a free application with a clean and functional interface that eliminates the restrictive nature of a smartphone browser. The trend today is the number of people accessing sites using mobile devices is rising fast. This calls for developers including those using WordPress to develop mobile user-friendly sites.

WordPress Themes and Plugins for user-friendly Mobile Sites

The great interest people have developed in iPads, iPhones and other smartphones have called for web developers to focus on creating user-friendly sites for mobile devices. WordPress is a dominant web platform in the web development industry where web designers and developers are creating WordPress mobile themes and plugins. Let us look at some of the best responsive WordPress plugins that display websites on mobile devices.

WPtouch

This plugin is available in free and premium versions. The plugin basically lays out an existing theme to fit mobile display and displays content. Even though it does nothing much, the bottom line is it is user-friendly, robust and easy to read. With the premium version, you can modify the colors and some styles of websites. Below is an example of a website customized for mobile viewing using WPtouch.

WordPress Mobile Pack

It can give a completely different look to websites for viewing on mobile devices. It is well liked by most WordPress Developers since it creates a mobile environment for your WordPress blog including an Admin panel. It also provides a mobile interface for editing posts but this has been surpassed to some level by WordPress for iOS and Android. An example of WordPress Mobile Pack at work is in the below mobile display.

Other plugins for displaying WordPress sites on mobile devices include Mobilize, WordPress PDA and iPhone, MobilePress, and WordPress Mobile Edition, which a fantastic tool to build a mobile version of your blog and even adds the interface for comments.

Now you want consistency in the design of your website and mobile site. This calls for the use of mobile themes. Twenty Eleven is a popular WordPress default theme for mobile devices.  More mobile themes are being developed each year. The Carrington family of themes can be used as parent themes since it allows editing of CSS and has functions to developers needs. Scherzo uses a mobile-first responsive design and is clean and minimalist. It can also be used as a parent theme. For e-commerce websites, it is tricky to make a mobile friendly version. With Jigoshop, which is an e-commerce plugin and theme, making mobile versions of e-commerce websites becomes easy. It has a responsive layout that can be tweaked to suit the design at hand.