Your search for a WordPress Mobile Theme is over! Well, at least mine is 🙂 I added the WPtouch-Pro plugin from BraveNewCode also known as BNC into WordPress to make this site more readable on mobile devices. It should now load pretty quick and look nice on devices such as the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and so on.

Upon checking my stats a while back I noticed that I was getting more visitors via mobile devices. While the numbers aren’t huge I thought it would probably be a good idea to provide a streamlined experience for those viewers that would allow them fast and direct access to this site and the articles within.

About a month ago I started working with mobile sites/css/etc to try and provide some mobile services for one of my personal project sites I have been working on.  That turned out to be an incredibly huge amount of work, especially for someone like me who doesn’t do a lot of layout coding.  While most phones will render regularly formatted web pages nicely, it’s important provide a format specifically for mobile devices.  Big buttons, readable text, minimal multi-touch zooming required, intelligent interface, etc.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time preparing a mobile theme but you also want something that is flexible to your needs you may wish to consider WPtouch.  You can do a search in the WordPress plug-ins or you can go their website to download the free 1.9 version of the plugin, or the WPtouch-Pro version from their website.

WPtouch basically takes your WordPress blog and pulls all the content apart on the fly and re-organizes it with a fresh new layout which is most at home on mobile phones.  While your computer based web users will continue to see your normal site template, users with smart phones will get a page which looks very at home on the portable device.

The basic interface of WPtouch-Pro was very easy to set up.  It lets you define all off the basic layout options including the icons used for various sections in the site. It comes with a large number of icons, and if you don’t like any of those you can add your own.  If you don’t like the template you can also create you own, or use one of the existing two.   The folks at BraveNewCode say that they will be adding new template designs shortly, and anyone who has registered for the 2.x version will get a free upgrade throughout the 2.x revision series to the newest plugin and the latest themes they have developed.

The WPtouch plugin is available for free on the WordPress plugin directory, but there is a newer 2.0 version out, WPtouch Pro that is $29 dollars per site or $59  (CAN) for a 5 site license.  Their plugin supports ‘web site as an app’ functionality in Safari and lots of other cool stuff such as themes, drop down menus, ajax enhanced interface, custom WPtouch-Pro  management interface panel, custom icons and it just goes on.  Check out their site for more info, I think you’ll like it.They also provide full commercial support for their product. I think WPTouch Pro is one of the top WP themes I have found out there, although it’s specifically for mobile viewers with smartphones.

If you use Adsense to help support the costs of your blogs, you’ll also be pleased to know that the WPTouch Pro theme also supports Adsense integration into your mobile content, and you’ll be able to view the statistics of ads which have been servered to smartphones in your Adsense control panel.

The current version does have support for custom WPTouch skins, however for the time being you will have to make your own WPTouch theme from a theme template as they do not have additional themes aside from the stock one. The stock WPTouch theme is highly configurable though, so this probably will not be a problem for most people.  Once they release some official themes for WPTouch I’m sure that will trigger a flood of user designed WPTouch theme content and as soon as some comes out I will update this post.

Check out http://www.jonshobbies.com on your mobile phone to see how it looks or just scan the following QR code on your device.   Please post a comment and let me know what you think, I’d appreciate it!

A WHAT CODE? A QR Code is a kind of bar code that rather than just being a bunch of variable width lines like | || |||| | || like you see on packages and on your mail, known as one dimensional, each dot on a QR represents a bit of data and it reads across and up and down.  QR codes can be used to store URL’s (like above), text, small pictures, map info, contact info, etc.   You can make your own QR Codes if you do a search for “QR Code Generator“.

To read a QR code you need a code reading application and a phone/computer with a camera.  There is a lot of different software out there.   For the Android the one I prefer is Barcode Scanner v3.4 . This is a basic bar code scanner that will let you search product IDs online (for price comparison while you shop) and of course read QR codes and go directly to the web page.

You will have to do a search if you have an iPhone, Black Berry or other device. Usually just going to your app market you can search for ‘bar code’ and get a lot of results.

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