Although Not So Well Exposed is only visited by a handful of mobile users, I really feel that a mobile version of the website is a must have in this day and age. Why bother? Because some say that more users will browse the Web from a mobile device than from a fixed terminal in the following years. So, switching to Wordpress made it pretty easy to set up a mobile version, in theory at least.

At first I wanted to go with Mobify, I heard a lot of good things about it so I wanted to check it out. The thing was that I didn’t really want to spend money on this feature yet, and the free version of Mobify had some limitations that interfered with my agenda. Seeing that I had to do much of the same editing by hand as if I used a specially designed theme for Wordpress (OK, not quite like that, but you still have to get your hands dirty, it’s not a “magic solution”). So, I started looking around for Wordpress plugins that could help me out. And let me tell you, there are a lot of them.

I played around with a few, but had to find one that fit these requirements:

• resize images for mobile
• swich between mobile and full site, in case the mobile redirect screwed up
• pretty much standard to code
• plays nice with W3 Total Cache which I use for caching

I’ll spare you the boring details of my search and tests to get to the actual good stuff. In the end I jumped on the Wordpress Mobile Pack bandwagon because it pretty much does everything I have on that list. Even with that it still has some kinks that have to be worked out, so in a weekend end I’ll try to sort them out, but for now it’s OK. On Not So Well Exposed it’s weirdly implemented (by my standards) because it’s just an edit of the main theme, so I’ll probably have to hang out around the Wordpress Forums to see how I could get it working as I would like it. But, I’ll leave that for when I have the time.

I had a mobile version on Pixelpost too, but it was bad. It didn’t adhere to the standards of publishing for mobile. And the biggest issue was that it loaded the full size image and then just make it fit the 320px screen of the user. But, it’s not cool to load an extra 200kb of data when the user doesn’t need it. So, that is why I wanted a mobile plug-in that resizes images, so Not So Well Exposed Mobile loads faster and is better for the users. Also, i stripped the landing page so i only shows the titles of the posts and not directly the post as was the case for the mobile Pixelpost version. All in all these changes sped up the site, and for the mobile Web, that’s really good news.

And this concludes the series on the redesign and migration of Not So Well Exposed.