WordPress.com Goes Mobile3

Now every time a new user starts a blog on WordPress.com, the default theme on their site will be mobile-friendly, demonstrating how important a consideration mobile devices have become for Web site owners.  The default configuration for new WordPress.com sites is a minimal, text-based theme that will load quickly and easily over a mobile phone’s Internet connection. By removing most of the formatting, WordPress ensures that it will load on virtually any of the dozens of mobile browsers on the market.

And of course, WordPress is giving special consideration to iPhone users, which makes sense given that they make up 50 percent of smartphone traffic. So each new WordPress blog will also come with the WPTouch theme that is specially designed for the iPhone.

In this new model, the blogs’ theme will automatically be ready for desktop and mobile Web traffic and will redirect iPhone users to the special theme. This way the experience remains very consistent for both mobile and desktop users outside of the special case for iPhone users.

While new WordPress.com bloggers may get the urge to jazz up their site’s theme by adding more pictures or formatting, they will be starting from a solid base. Though some might have the urge to create entirely separate mobile and desktop experiences, the experience can be fairly harrowing.

When designing a site for the Web, there are three primary desktop browsers that a developer has to consider. However the mobile industry still has dozens of proprietary browsers, so building special redirects to multiple versions could be a full time job.

Using plain text and simple formatting will help to eliminate the need to consider each mobile browser separately. Hopefully this will combat the poor mobile Web experiences that users face when surfing to sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

Mobile browsers are quickly starting to integrate more advanced CSS styling and JavaScript capabilities, but the small screen may be changing our approach to Web design forever.

With the increasing adoption of mobile internet usage WordPress has announced that from today users of it’s hosted blogging platform will now have access to two mobile themes which will automatically load when the users site is accessed by a mobile device.

The two themes available include a modification of the popular WPtouch for modern mobile browsers. The second is a variation on the older WordPress Mobile Edition which will display for other compatible handsets. Users will also have the option to disable the feature should they wish to do so.

WordPress claims that over 60 million page views are generated each month from mobile devices, and this increasing usage was a major reason for the move to ensure support for mobile devices.