Orangeinks

Mobify.me: Create a Mobile Version of Your Website

Optimizing a website’s landing page for mobile viewing is not an easy task. That’s what Mobify.me is trying to solve. They aim to provide an easy way for developers to produce a mobile version of websites in just a few hours of work.

This will allow you to make a faster loading mobile version of your website. You can choose which elements you want to include and upload custom images optimized for mobile viewing. This means that you can lower the bandwidth cost of loading your site on a mobile device. Resizing images is one way of doing it.

You can also customize your links, pages and edit CSS. Mobify also supports DNS redirects. This means that your mobile site will not lose its URL structure when you use your mobile URL (e.g.: http://m.yoursite.com). Mobify.me users are also provided with a JavaScript snippet that detects mobile devices which will drive mobile users to your mobile URL.

Mobile site (if it exists at all) is separate in terms of content management flow and URL structure, creating SEO challenges. Unless a site has a dedicated tech team or is using a framework with decent mobile functionality (aside from WordPress, there isn’t many), this is difficult.

Developing a mobile presence is a lot of work. Device detection, image resizing, content syncing… Mobile used to be difficult. Mobifying a complete site takes from 5 minutes (a blog) to several hours (a complex portal like TechVibes).

Tags: Design, Mobify, mobile, mobile phone, website

Create A Mobile Version Of Your Blog With Mofuse

Mofuse is a webtool that can help you take advantage of the growing mobile internet users. The service allows you to create a mobile version of your blog or website. Registration only takes a few minutes and setup is very easy. Once you have registered, just type in the title of your blog and your RSS URL (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/Orangeinks ) and a mobile version will automatically be created for your site (e.g. http://orangeinks.mofuse.mobi/).

Once you have created your site’s mobile version, all you need to do is to paste the PHP code of the automatic redirect feature on top of your header. By doing this, all mobile users that will access your site will be redirected to your created mobile site. I must warn you that the generated mobile site is not very pretty to look at, for it is designed for mobile phones with simple mobile browsers. This allows users to browse your pages faster even if they are using a phone with low memory and a slow mobile internet like Edge. If you want your logo to display on the header page, you can upgrade to a pro user for 6 dollars a month. The pro user will also get a custom domain for their mobile site.

Another feature of Mofuse that you might find useful is the comment widget that can be added to the mobile version of your blog. This feature is currently in beta and may not work properly on every mobile device. With this widget enabled MoFuse will add a comment/feedback page to your mobile site’s main menu. From this feature your visitors can leave your mobile site comments and/or feedback. I spent a couple of minutes to test this feature and it seemed that the comments widget does not work on my opera mini mobile browser. Some feedback about this feature will be greatly appreciated.

Mofuse also gives bloggers a chance to monetize their mobile websites through their revenue sharing program. The revenues will be spit 50/50 (A pro user account will let you take the moolah all for your self). All you have to do is place your Admob Site ID or your Adsense Publisher ID.

Tags: Blog, mobile, mofuse, monetize