Time for action—identifying how your site should work on mobiles

If you're planning on making your own mobile-friendly site, grab a paper and pen, and make a note of your answers to the following questions:

  1. Which mobile devices are you targeting? The main thing to think about is whether you're just interested in smartphones, or whether visitors to your site will be using lower-specification devices without full web browsers (for example, feature phones, which are more widely used than you may think).
  2. Does your site have images or a logo that you want to display on mobiles?
  3. Are there any widget areas on your site that you need to display on mobiles? Even if you've used widgets, you may not always need to display them to mobile visitors.
  4. How much control do you want over the way your site looks on mobiles? Some plugins come with alternative themes or styling options, letting you pick colors and styles to some extent.
  5. How will people be accessing your site? There's a good chance that they'll be using 3G or another slower method of data transfer. Speed and file sizes are, therefore, important to save losing visitors or alienating them because you're using up their data allowance.

When we come to looking at some individual plugins, we will identify how each of them addresses the questions you've just answered.

What just happened?

You now have some criteria you can use while choosing the best plugin for your site.

In the case of the Carborelli's site, our criteria are as follows:

  1. The site will be targeting smartphones; in particular, iPhones, Android devices, and Blackberries. Access from other phones is not essential.
  2. The logo isn't crucial on mobile devices—it's more important for people to be able to get the content. However, there are images and an embedded map showing Carborelli's location, which are important.
  3. The site uses a widget area for the sidebar, making it easier for the client to update information in the future. So yes, it's important that widget areas are displayed.
  4. Fine control over the styles isn't essential as long as the default style provided by the plugin is smart and images are displayed, as they will provide a lot of visual cues.
  5. Most users will be from the USA and using 3G. Speed and file size are important to reduce data transfer, so we'll be looking for a plugin that doesn't make too many server requests and downloads smaller versions of images.

    The Carborelli's site, when tested using Google speed test (https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/) scores a fairly respectable 75 out of 100. Ideally, a mobile plugin should speed the site up, so give a higher score.

We will come back to these criteria shortly while looking at some plugins.

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