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

Identifying the best approach for your site


Before starting, it’s a good idea to think about your website, its content and functionality, and consider what the best approach might be.

First let’s look at the options available to us.

Options for developing a mobile site

There are five main options for developing a mobile site as follows:

  • Using a mobile plugin: This gives us a mobile-friendly site with the minimum of effort, but doesn’t give us much scope to incorporate our own design into the mobile site, as we saw in the previous chapter. Many mobile plugins also don’t target tablet devices.

  • Using an off-the-shelf responsive theme: There are a number of free responsive themes available in the WordPress plugin repository. In this chapter we’ll look at some of them and see how we can tweak them so that our mobile site is more consistent with our desktop site.

  • Using an off-the-shelf responsive theme for mobile devices and our existing desktop theme for desktop computers: We achieve this by using...