More and more people are using mobile devices to consume content, both professional and personal. It’s a macro trend affecting business and society at large, and your online presence needs to respond.
According to Google Analytics, 29 percent of the traffic to chrisparente.com in the past 30 days came from a mobile device. Google Analytics includes iPads in that category, but that’s still a lot of small screens that can’t accommodate my desktop front page. There is an easy to use WordPress plugin called WPtouch that gives your WordPress site a very serviceable mobile version, without the need to edit any code.
My going mobile experience didn’t stay that simple for long, however. I accepted an upgrade from Verizon on my Motorola Razr Maxx phone to the 4.1.2 version of Android. Unfortunately doing so removed all the formatting from my WPtouch front page. So anyone using that version of Android was getting a terrible user experience from my site.
To find a work around, I jumped into the WordPress support forums. If this was happening to me it was happening to others, and I wanted to find someone sharing information about a fix. I really appreciated this kind of generous online help last year when I migrated from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.
Sure enough, there was a spirited conversation going on amongst users of WPtouch whose pages had been messed up by the new Android version. Eventually a solution was found — thanks again AidenC and Jason — and I was able to edit the code in three .php files of the WPtouch plugin. My first code hack, and it worked!
- Screen shot
If you haven’t already, make sure you’re offering a good experience to your mobile visitors. And if you run into trouble, answers are usually out there if you spend a little time to find them.