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

What is a web app and why would we develop one?


A web app is a website that looks and behaves like a native app, which you would download to your mobile device. The users interact with it like an app they download from their app store or app marketplace, but instead of it being on the device, it’s accessed via the browser.

The main difference between a web app and a mobile site is that a web app usually performs a function—that is, the visitor uses it to do something rather than to consume content. A good example of a web app is the Facebook website—it functions in the same way as its app on a mobile and includes app-like navigation, as shown in the following screenshot:

Some advantages of web apps over native apps are as follows:

  • A web app works across a range of platforms, so we don’t have to develop a separate version for different devices

  • We can update our app quickly and easily without waiting for the updated version to be featured in the app store or be downloaded by users

  • If we’re making...