Communication Steroids: ‘Goin’ Mobile’
Before Communication Steroids Goes Mobile
If you’ve caught any of our podcasts lately we discussed the prospect of making our website more ‘mobile-friendly.’ With more smartphones being sold this year than standard computers, we’ll have more and more people having the capability to access our website (and others) via the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid and more.
One question to ask: why bother? Seriously, why should you want to put up a completely different-looking site with the same information for the people who access your site on-the-go from a smartphone? Because if your site is smartphone-friendly, you’ll find that people who are mobile will tend to come back to your site more frequently. And they’ll tell others.
To make it easier, we finally tracked down a WordPress plug-in that does exactly what we want. There are a number of websites and services that promise to create a new website for you and put it on a .mobi URL. Nice, but…some of them want you to pay a monthly fee. Others give you a freebie but it’s a limited scope site. Not only that, you have to create the site from scratch, so it’s a separate ‘stand-alone’ site from your main site. That means when you update one you have to update the other. Uh-uh. Who wants that much extra work?
Well, it turns out that getting the .mobi URL was not necessary. You can easily access this site with the new mobile look by just logging on. That’s all there is to it.
Finally the search for an easy-to-install, functional WordPress plug-in was successful. It’s called Carrington Mobile and while the installation instructions are a bit different than a typical plug-in or theme, it’s a very easy 2 or 3 step process. And as far as we can tell, it works great.
AFTER Communication Steroids Went Mobile
One other thing. I thought I’d take photos of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ looks of the site just to compare. After snapping a couple of photos that frankly didn’t look to good I got to thinking: what are those other guys on places like Gizmodo doing to get those cool screen shots of their iPhone?
A quick Google search (and I mean one or two clicks) and I found this short article that informed me there’s already a screenshot utility on the iPhone. Whodathunk?
Are you trying to communicate with your audience? Are you anticipating that many of them are going mobile and you need to make the move? It’s great that the move is that easy for a WordPress blog. If that’s how your blog is set-up, check out the plug-in and see if it works for you.
Check out the before and after shots of the site…and let us know what you think. And feel free to chime in on the subject: are you ‘goin’ mobile’ and accessing the web via a smartphone? Are you hoping to in the near future? Do you think that’s where the world is going?
