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

Using PHP to send different content to different devices


For content that could slow a mobile site down, we want to avoid sending anything to the mobile device at all. To do this, we need to adopt a server-side solution. PHP is a server-side language and is what drives WordPress, so happily we can make use of it to send different content to different devices, and so make our user experience and site speed better for mobile users.

In the previous chapter, we installed the mobble plugin and used the conditional functions it gave us to send different image files to different devices. We can use this technique with other content, too.

Let's try out this method by not sending the three Carborelli's home page images to smartphones. The following screenshot shows how they look on an iPhone:

We've made them appear smaller using CSS, but they are actually still large files and could slow our site down. So, let's use PHP to avoid sending them to smartphones altogether.