WordPress has launched a couple of new mobile themes for bloggers who use WordPress.com. The themes are designed to display automatically when the blogger’s blog is accessed with a compatible mobile device.
Making moves to get blogs to display properly on mobile devices is a good move considering recent research, which found that consumers are generally not pleased with the way mobile web sites display.
“While mobile users may accept sites that are ‘light’ on richness and small in form factor, they are evidently not willing to sacrifice performance,” said Matt Poepsel of Gomez, the company behind the research. “The mobile Web is all about convenience – the Web in your pocket -and slow mobile pages contradict that benefit. To avoid ongoing dissatisfaction and to capitalize on the mobile opportunity, businesses need to place mobile performance management squarely at the top of their to-do lists.”
The WordPress themes should make that easier for on the blog side of things.
One theme is a modification of WPtouch, and will be displayed to phones with modern web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones. The other was developed from an older version of the WordPress Mobile Edition and will be displayed to all other mobile devices.
“Mobile visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives,” says WordPress. “They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. If you are using a custom header image, it will be scaled to size and displayed at the top of your blog. When viewing your blog on other phones, the focus will be on loading the blog quickly while displaying the important information about your content.”
According to WordPress, over 60 million page views a month of WordPress.com blogs have been on mobile devices.
