Creative Graphics Design: how-to-make-your-website-mobile

Thanks to the generosity and help from Mobify, Just Creative Design now has a mobile version. This means you can read JCD’s articles on your iPhone or mobile device while having the pages & images load up to 7 times faster. See some of the screenshots below if you haven’t got an internet enabled phone or use this site for a rough emulation (type http://m.justcreativedesign.com as the address).

It was really easy to set up the mobile version of JCD through Mobify’s dashboard… the interface behind the scenes of Mobify is quite easy to use and I had the mobile version of JCD customised within 20 minutes of signing in to their site.

The only real problem I had was trying to create my own domain name (http://m.justcreativedesign.com rather than http://jcd.mobify.com) as I had to change my DNS CNAME records which I had to contact my hosts for.

However in saying that, the support of Mobify was very helpful – in many cases I had a response to my questions within a few minutes or if not, a few hours.

Mobify also offer a variety of CMS plugins that automatically directs users on a phone / mobile device to the mobile version of the site rather than the full site which is pretty handy (if not essential).

Oh, and you get your own icon too which is useful if people want to create an icon shortcut to your website on their phone homescreen (see screenshot below). You can also track the mobile traffic stats through Google Analytics.

Anyway, the good news is that Mobify are currently offering this service for free, so maybe you want a mobile version for your site?

For those who want a do-it-yourself alternative, there are also a number free Wordpress plugins out there (that I haven’t tested) ie. Mobile Press & dotMobi (not associated with Mobify).

When I asked Mobify how they differed from plugins such as these, this was their reply:

Mobify is a universal mobile design environment… Plug-ins like this one aren’t bad, but they look very simple and make your site look like any other site with that plugin. Usually they only support the very basic functionality (posts, comments) so any 3rd party modules you have are unusable.
With Mobify our intention was to build a tool with the simplicity of Photoshop, that allows you to literally do anything for mobile. In the future we will see if we can migrate more of our features down into the plugin space, right now our plugin is for redirection only.
So yeah, we’re just a different approach to the mobile problem!

So yeah, up to you which route you go, but I recommend Mobify.

iPhone Screenshot