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

Proper responsive images—sending different image files to different devices


Web developers have been working on the problem of sending different files to different devices for a few years, and a number of solutions have been proposed. Out of the plethora of methods out there, I'm going to look at one which uses inbuilt WordPress functionality. This method uses WordPress-featured images combined with a plugin called mobble to identify mobile devices.

However, before we start it's important to address one assumption about mobile connections.

Are mobiles always slow?

It's easy to assume that mobile users will be on a slower connection than desktop users, but this may not always be the case. Consider the growing number of smartphone owners who use them to access the Internet at home.

Note

A survey of smartphone users (http://blog.compete.com/2010/03/12/smartphone-owners-a-ready-and-willing-audience) found that 84 percent of them use their phone to access the Internet at home, making this the most...