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

Choosing how to develop our web app


There are a few different methods we could choose to develop our app, and the one we go for will depend on the app’s design and the existing site design. These methods are as follows:

  • Using a plugin to deliver an app-like experience “out of the box”

  • Taking our responsive design further to make the site look and feel like an app on mobile devices

  • Developing a separate theme for use on mobile devices, which will look and feel app-like

  • Creating a new site on a subdomain of the main site, which will have its own theme and content

Pros and cons of the different methods

Let’s take a look at each of those methods in turn and when each might be relevant:

Approach

Advantages

Disadvantages

Using a plugin can be the quickest and easiest option but involves some compromises.

Installing, activating, and configuring a plugin can be much quicker than the other options.

We have much less control over the design and functionality of our web app if we use a plugin.

Some...