As a blogger in today’s world, targeting your mobile users can be a daunting task, especially considering the fact that most of them spend their time using apps: 86% of the average US mobile consumer’s time, or 2 hrs and 19 minutes per day.
It’s clear that solving the screen-size issue (responsive web design) is not enough to keep mobile readers engaged, hence the need to evolve beyond responsiveness. Already there’s a lot of buzz around adaptive design where the “magic” is in that the device and device-specific features are detected and a website is served to the user based on that information. While the ideas behind adaptive and responsive design are similar, they are not the same thing. Much of what’s different is in the HTML and CSS, and how that information is served to users.
The main advantage of adaptive design is that it ensures the best user experience for all your visitors, regardless of their device. Your mobile visitors will see an application that is touch-friendly and optimized for their device, whereas your desktop users will see a site that caters primarily to their device.
WordPress Mobile Pack allows you to do just that: package your blog’s content into a cross-platform mobile web applications (HTML5) that completely feels like a native app, with swift animations and no loading times. We took WPMayor’s content for a spin and this is what we’ve got:
Here’s how we did it
1. Installed & activated WordPress Mobile Pack
2. From the WP Mobile Pack dashboard we selected one of the predefined color schemes that best matched our branding. We chose not to do anything to the fonts, although you have the option to change it according to your needs.
3. Added app icon, logo & cover
4. Decided what post categories and pages we should keep visible on the mobile application from the “Content” tab.
5. We also didn’t have to do anything to the language because the default is English, but WP Mobile Pack supports: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian.
WordPress Mobile Pack also comes with a PRO version which can be purchased here. WordPress Mobile Pack PRO is a self-hosted solution suited for personal blogs and small publishers that comes with:
- 3 App Themes (fully customizable)
- Social Features (Facebook, Twitter & Google+)
- Monetization Options (Google AdSense & Double Click for Publishers)
- 1 Year of Professional Support
- Ongoing Features & Security Updates
- Single WordPress Site License
Here are some walkthrough videos that can get you started with WordPress Mobile Pack PRO:
On October 7th, WordPress announced that a new REST API will be included in the upcoming releases on WordPress.org. The idea of using a REST API to access WordPress data is not new, in fact WordPress.com has been offering access to a REST API of its own for years now.
The release of a standardized API could open the door to a whole new way of building WordPress plugins and especially, mobile themes. Theme creators will be able to introduce advanced Javascript components in their designs or why not, build single page applications, without worrying about maintaining the back-end as well.
WordPress Mobile Pack has already taken steps towards easily supporting the new REST API once released. One thing is for sure: we’re going to see more and more single page applications and the mobile web is going to evolve into something new and exciting, where everything is an app instead of a site, where user interactions are more important than just page views and finally where all apps are interconnected into a web of apps.
