Promoting your Mobile Version
I made a change to the Mowser Wordpress plugin to add a sidebar widget to promote the mobile version from the desktop version. It’s just a little Mowser badge and a link to the mobile URL for the current page. I have it running on my blog (which is probably where you’re reading this, but if not check it out here), up on the top of the sidebar. One of the problems with publishing a proper mobile version these days is that best practice says things should just automatically be mobile when you hit them with a mobile device. The problem is, years of stuff not working on mobile devices have conditioned people not to just type in a site and expect it to work. So how do people find out about your mobile version? Portals are one way, and search is increasingly driving traffic. But directly promoting your site can also drive users, and also just reminds people that more sites are coming online every day that they can use from their phone.
Sidebar widgets are a relatively recent addition to Wordpress, just becoming part of the default core features during 2.2. If you’re using 2.0 or 2.1 you need to download a plugin to allow sidebar widgets. You’ll also need a widget enabled theme, not a problem if you have a recent install, but I have a theme that I had been hacking over and over again. I decided to scrap it and use a new theme and the widgets to make the customizations I had. Which actually worked out quite well.
If you have a system that supports it you can configure sidebar widgets in the Presentation area or your dashboard, the subsection is simply called “Widgets”. Drag the Mowser Plugin widget from the Available Widgets tray up to the sidebar and save the changes. If you haven’t been using widget at all, adding the Mowser widget will replace the default sidebar for your theme and you’ll have to also add whatever used to be there before. Not really a part of the system I like, but I think I understand why things ended up that way. After you save the changes you should be all set, the badge linking to your mobile version should appear in the sidebar of your pages.
One of the things I liked about the Wordpress sidebar widgets is that they’re rendered server-side. So now my twitters and del.icio.us bookmarks appear in the Mowser version of my blog, which I like quite a bit.
