14 DAY TRIAL // The mobile web is growing at an increased pace and, with more and more mobile users, everyone is moving to meet the demand and hopefully get a piece of the revenue that it's bound to generate. WordPress.com has also recognized the need for a dedicated mobile experience, so it's launching two customized blog themes specially designed for mobile phones.
“Thousands of you have been using the iPhone and Blackberry applications to post and edit content for your blog, and over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices. New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all,” WordPress explains. “Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone.”
The two themes are designed for two types of phones and will be served depending on the device’s capabilities. The first theme is based on the WPtouch mobile one and is intended for the more powerful and fully featured devices that sport a full HTML browser, like the iPhone or Android ones.
The theme looks pretty stylish and takes advantage of some more advanced features, which only some devices support, making heavy use of the AJAX code for the comments and posts loading. Most of the blog features are available with this theme, obviously the posts, but also pages and comments and it even has automatic header scaling.
A second theme, based on the WordPress Mobile Edition one, will be served to all other devices and is designed for a simple layout stripping out most of the unnecessary features, leaving just the actual information, what the users came for in the first place.
It does look pretty drab, but it means that older devices, some of which failed to render certain elements or sections or even refused to load the site altogether, can now access the blog. The themes will be enabled by default for all blogs, but owners can choose to disable them from the Dashboard.
