Design Tutorial: How to make a WordPress blog work on an iPhone and other mobile devices

Want to make your WordPress blog work on most mobile devices? Try one of these WordPress plugins.

Making Your Blog Mobile Friendly with Plug-ins

A plug-in is a software package that you can add to a blog to enhance its features. You can use plug-ins to fight off spammers, add your Twitter feed to a sidebar, or integrate Google Maps into your blog.

Our Favorite WordPress Mobile Plugins

Here are a few of the WordPress plug-ins for the iPhone/iPad we recommend you consider using on your blog:

WPtouch: One of the most popular plug-ins for the iPhone and other mobile devices, this one add-on solves several problems at once. It converts the look of your blog into something akin to an iPhone App by adding a special them. It’s highly customizable so you can customize the appearance. And the developers promise, it won’t change a single line of code in your main WordPress theme. Upgrade to the pro version and you can customize the design even further. (We use the WPTouch plugin to make our Mobile Web Design Blog look good on the iPhone. If you want to see it in action, visit www.mobilewebdesignblog.com in a web browser and on your iphone.)

WordPress Mobile Pack: The most sophisticated of the mobile plug-ins, the WordPress Mobile Pack adds as suite of tools, including a mobile switcher, themes, widget, and mobile admin panel. That means you can take care of all your iPhone (and other mobile phone) needs with this one handy plug-in. In addition, this plug-in adds analytics to help you track mobile traffic, and a mobile ad widget integrated with Google’s Adsense and the AdMob advertising network.

iPhone Control Panel: This plug-in makes it possible to add custom CSS, designed specifically for the iPhone, and directs iPhone devices to display those styles instead of main styles for your WordPress theme. In addition, you get a bookmark icon and the ability to redirect visitors to a distinct URL.

iPhone-WebApp-Redirection: As the name implies, this plugin detects if a visitor is using an iPhone, iPad, or iPod and then directs them to a specified URL. This makes it easy for you to direct visitors to any page or special version of your site based on the device they are using. This plug-in can also detect phones that run the Android operating system, as well as some Blackberry phones and other devices.

iPhone Them Switcher: This plug-in lets you automatically change the theme used in your blog when someone views the blog with an iPhone.

iPhone Countdown: Use this plug-in to add a count-down counter to your blog -- a great way to remind visitors how many shopping days they have before Christmas, how many days before the next election, or any other date you want to make sure your visitors don’t miss.

Mobile Blog Design for the iPad

Thousands more WordPress plug-ins can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins. You can spend hours browsing the myriad ways that programmers around the world have tried to customize the functions of WordPress blogs. If you have any PHP programming skills, you might even come up with some new ways on your own.

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