Andy Coates Blog

Last week I decided to upgrade my mobile phone and decided to go for an all singing and all dancing Mda Vario ii, (great review by Cool Smart Phone) whats more, I have unlimited internet access and with the continual growth of wi-fi spots and lots of hidden free ones I expect more and more people to access the Internet form their hand held devices. After setting up my phone (if you can call it that) the first site I went to was Google which redirected me to a mobile friendly page, the second site I went to was my blog. Watching my blog load was like a Picasso painting taking shape right before my eyes, everything went skewed, elements got squeezed and my page ended up with everything being stacked up on-top of each other! The page was viewable but navigation was a little tricky if you wanted to visit anywhere other then the front page!

From this experience I decided to see if there were any blogging platforms suitable for mobile devices and was surprised and happy to find a fantastic little plugin which you could add to your wordpress blog and it would resize it for mobile devices when it recognizes the interface. Andy Moore is the man who came up with this fantastic plugin and has done a superb job, after installing it I have checked my blog on 2 other mobile devices and it makes much sense now. The only thing I need to do is edit the CSS a little more as I'm still currently experimenting with color schemes. Editing the CSS is really easy asy ou just edit the small CSS script near the end of the .php plugin file.

Not only will this plugin instantly make your blog mobile friendly, but it wont affect your current theme and you can monetize your mobile blog by selecting the option in the plugin menu. If you do decide to monetize there will be a text link (or 2 depending on your preferences) added to your mobile blog and you will need to register with Admob and add your publisher code to begin making any money made from adverts.

And here it is, a screenshot from my mobile site!! Ta Da!! You can try it in your browser by going to this address: http://www.andy-coates.com/blog/?mobi . To see what any page on my site looks like just add " ?mobi " after the web address and it will display the mobile version.

Maybe on Sunday when I have some free time I'll experiment with colors and fonts and see what looks nice on my device. I'm really not sure how many hits I'll get on my mobile blog bu it will be an interesting exercise finding out if there is any difference in SEO for mobile blogs. If you want to make your blog "Moblie Friendly" this is one plugin which will do nearly all of the work for you, who knows it could be another great niche. Ill be updating the progress and any modifications I make to my "Mobi Blog" here so keep checking back!

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!