If you’re serious about building a business or portable career around a blog, you only have a few months to get one particular technical aspect under control.
I’m talking about mobile.
Fewer people today are accessing the internet from a PC than from a mobile device. Most of us use laptops, netbooks, tablets and even smart phones. So if you’re offering a blog, you need to make sure it’s readable on any and all of these devices.
Mobile devices are expected to overtake desktop devices in 2014, according to this article. Sitepronews.com states:
“Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to increase to 2 billion.”
(If you want to see what your site looks like on a mobile device, here’s a list of 10 tools for testing your site on mobile devices, and another one here.)
The old school way to make a WordPress site mobile-friendly was to install a plugin that would recognize when a reader was viewing your site on a mobile device and would serve them up a different, easier-to-read version.
Today, though, more and more developers are creating themes to be fully mobile responsive.
This means WordPress will recognize the device the viewer is using and adjust accordingly to provide an attractive, easily readable version of your site on the device.
Here are 14 fully mobile responsive themes for your expat blog (aff).
- Generate Theme — when your top priority is collecting email addresses
- Balance — an easy minimalist design
- (in)SPYR — lots of customized features built in, like a dynamic slider
- Agency — a very professional theme
- Mocha — sophisticated, uncluttered and upscale
- Driskill — A perfect marriage of timeless design with modern capabilities
- Whitelight — full width featured slider, portfolio management (great for photographers and designers)
- Currents — newspaper style theme with featured slider and lots of other goodies
- Buro — elegant business theme
- Olya — business portfolio theme
- Evolution — more like a CMS (content management system) than a pure blog, this is an elegant responsive theme
- Aggregate — another magazine-style CMS theme
- Chameleon — simple and professional with loads of customization options
- Gleam — for showing off your portfolio
Do you have a favorite mobile responsive theme you’d like to recommend? Let us know in the Comments!
Great stuff! Based on your recommendation I went ahead and took care of optimizing my site for mobile today. Added a post and set a link your way for the mobile themes list.
Thanks!
-Rich
Glad you found it helpful, Rich!
Just one to add to the list – The catalyst framework theme is now mobile responsive out of the box. Unfortunately I can’t use it on my main site given all the customization that I have done. But if I was starting again it would be Catalyst all the way.