Friday, November 6, 2009

MAKE YOUR BLOG MOBILE

Nothing is of great importance to bloggers as traffic. It's hard to think of another thing that would bring a serious blogger more delight. A blogger can probably win a few readers but to keep them coming back a blogger needs to pay just as much attention on the general outlook and simplicity (for lack of a better word) of the blog as he should on the content. Simplicity here refers to the conveniency of the site, readers should be able to find what they are looking for with ease. But most of all bloggers and indeed website owners should worry more about the ease of their site's accessibility, especially through the mobile phone. And especially bloggers from this region and the generally the East.

In Kenya for example, the number of internet users is steadily growing and a large portion of these users use mobile phones for the internet most of the time, I being among them. I use Opera Mini to browse the internet, yes it helps to make PC websites 'fit' on a mobile phone screen but when the site is too large, maneuvering around it can be cumbersome and also make your phone slower. That is why I desired to create a mobile site for my blog and I was surprised at how there are so many alternatives to that effect. Left me wondering what I had been waiting for all this time. Having a mobile site for your blog or website has become so necessary. I being a thorough user of mobile phones for the internet can't help but avoid certain blogs which I know to be extremely large and save it for when I'm near a PC. On the contrary I'm filled with a lot of relief when I'm re-directed to a mobile phone version of site.

The most popular website for the creation of mobile sites is Mofuse. They do it for free and is unbelievably simple. You can have your mobile site running in under 5 minutes! I tried it. But I wasn't impressed with Mofuse so much though, but if you are using a mobile phone to view this, you can view the mobile site for this blog here.

First, for blogger blogs, people trying to access the blog cannot automatically be re-directed to the mobile site when they are using a phone, so you have to promote the mobile site separate from the PC version of the site. As for wordpress blogs, there's a pluggin that you can download and install in your site to allow for re-directing. Second, I could not find my comments in my mobile site yet that is one of the reasons why I wanted a mobile site- to make commenting using a mobile phone easy both for me and my readers. Currently I'm looking into the following other options...

And these are other websites from where you can create a mobile site;

1. Mobify.me: Mobify is a free service that makes WordPress, Drupal and other websites mobile-friendly. That is how it defines itself. Here you can design a mobile layout for your website and also capture mobile traffic from Twitter & Google. Not bad.

2. Bango

3.Zinadoo

4. XtGem.com: This website as I see it is just a mobile site builder and does not convert an existing PC website into a mobile one.

5. Winksite: This website allows you to mobilize your website, blog and twitter feeds. It also lets you personalize your mobile site with your own sense of style. In addition to that you start a mobile chat room, forum or poll. This I may like, moving on.

6. FeedM8 (Feed-mate): According to the site itself, this is a whole new way to get the mobile web. You can get your favorite blogs or feed-enabled websites on your mobile device. This means you get all the popular sites, top news, social networks, sports, celebrity and weather updates all on your mobile phone--anytime, anywhere. The content is designed for your mobile phone and it's optimized, so it's fast and uses very little data. Plus if you have a blog or a feed-enabled website, you can get it on FeedM8. Thus you can create a mobile site of your blog here.


7. MobisiteGalore

5 Educated Opinions Yet:

Unknown said...

This was quite informative. I was looking to make my site mobile ready, but I wasn't quite sure where to start.
I read somewhere that in the coming decade, close to 90% of all internet connections will be made through mobile devices.

Wyndago said...

Mwistar, I'm glad you found this post resourceful. I'm telling you, we can't ignore the mobile phones in relation to internet usage.. and eventually in making life better. When you do get a mobile site, let me check it out.

Sleek said...

Woah...thanks a lot. that's one angle i'd never thought of: the geek in me is very excited. going to follow-through on this. is my site one of the heavy ones?

Chicago liposuction said...

I suppose they’d do so when they come out of beta OR after they’ve had enough users on the system during the beta period.

I still have 9 invites if anyone is interested.

Wyndago said...

I'm sorry, invites for what?

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