Book Image

WordPress Mobile Web Development: Beginner's Guide

By : RACHEL MCCOLLIN
Book Image

WordPress Mobile Web Development: Beginner's Guide

By: RACHEL MCCOLLIN

Overview of this book

The chances are that more of your WordPress website visitors are using mobiles, or more clients are demanding responsive or mobile sites. If you can use WordPress to build mobile-friendly sites you can win more business from clients and more traffic for your site. "WordPress Mobile Web Development Beginner's Guide" will benefit you whether you've dabbled in WordPress or worked with it for years. It will help you identify which approach to mobile is most appropriate for your site (responsive, mobile, or web app) and learn how to make each one work, demonstrating a variety of techniques from the simple to the more complex, working through clear practical examples and applying these to your own website. Start by quickly making a WordPress site mobile-friendly, using off the shelf plugins and responsive themes, choosing the best ones for you and customising them. This leads into responsive theme design, with advice on layout, images and navigation. Finally, learn how to build a web app in WordPress, making use of plugins, APIs and custom code. If you need to hit the ground running with mobile WordPress development, then this book is for you. With practical examples and exercises from the beginning, it will help you build your first mobile WordPress site without having to learn aspects of WordPress or mobile development that aren't relevant. It will also help you understand which approaches work and why, so you can apply this knowledge to future projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
WordPress Mobile Web Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Acknowledgement
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Summary


We learned a lot in this chapter about configuring some of the plugins that let us quickly make a site mobile-friendly.

Specifically, we learned how to identify our criteria for choosing the most appropriate plugin for a site and how to install and configure two plugins—WordPress Mobile Pack and the hugely popular WPtouch. We also learned that different plugins offer us different options and functionality, for example, WordPress Mobile Pack supports widgets while WPtouch has some nice options for colors and fonts, as well as for uploading logos and icons. The plugins can have a significant impact on the site's speed. While there are plenty of plugins that do this job, there are actually very few that do it very well.

Based on the criteria we have set, the most appropriate plugin for the Carborelli's site is WordPress Mobile Pack. None of the other two displayed the important widget areas, WPtouch made the site slow and Mobile Pack handled menus poorly. However, if your site doesn't contain widgets or a lot of images, you may find that WPtouch is the most appropriate with its myriad options and available tweaks.

When working with an existing desktop site, like Carborelli's, a plugin is often the quickest and easiest way to make the site mobile-friendly. But what if you don't already have a theme, or you're not too attached to the one that you have? That's where mobile-friendly themes come in, which is what we will learn about in the next chapter.