Recently we wrote about the importance of making your real estate blog easy to read from a mobile browser. Today, we consider several tools that allow you to do this if you’re blogging with WordPress.
- Mobify is a web service that provides a quick way to optimize your site for mobile access. The basic plan is free and offers great controls over how your site will be seen in mobile web browsers. But because it requires some knowledge of CSS style sheet language, it’s not a solution for everyone.
- WpTouch Pro ($29 for a single-site license), is a WordPress plug-in that lets you create a separate mobile theme for your website. When a visitor comes to your site, WPtouch automatically determines whether the visitor is using a computer or a mobile browser and displays the appropriate version of your site. Images, captions, videos, and text are all scaled to make them easy to view on the smaller screen.
- MobilePress is a free, open source WordPress plug-in that adapts your blog for mobile viewing. You can customize your site by creating your own mobile theme or use one of MobilePress’ pre-designed themes. And because it’s open source, you’ll enjoy plenty of support from its community of developers and users.
Along with these “outside” resources are several traditional WordPress plug-ins:
- WPtouch iPhone Theme Plug-in. The free version of WPtouch Pro, above, WPTouch iPhone Theme Plug-in automatically transforms the mobile version of your blog into a cool iPhone-application style theme complete with iPhone-style icons and tap functionality. The iPhone-style theme works for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm users and gives them the option of easily switching to your regular blog theme if they need to.
- WordPress Mobile Pack is a comprehensive set of tools that includes mobile themes, extra widgets, and a mobile admin panel that lets you configure your site or post content from your own mobile device. Images, text, and videos are scaled to fit the viewer’s mobile browser and viewers can from switch from the mobile theme to your regular website theme if they wish.
- WordPress Mobile Edition transforms your blog into an easy-to-read version for mobile visitors. This is a great plug-in if you want something easy to use that you don’t have to fiddle around with. But beware: this plug-in has few setting to change since almost everything has been configured for you. As a result, there’s no easy way to alter the configuration or customize the viewing experience for your mobile readers.
