Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Planning to make our Quotes site "TheQuotes.Net" mobile friendly.




Few weeks back I had published a post listing the suggestions given by LinkedIn users for improving our Motivational Quotes Website "TheQuotes.Net".


One of the significant suggestions is, "making the website mobile friendly".


 I had decided to implement this suggestion (i-e making the site mobile-friendly) first, because large number of people visit this Quotes  website from their mobile devices.  According to Google Analytics Reports, more than 21% of the traffic to the TheQuotes.Net website is coming from various mobile devices, while our other sites receive only around 1% of the traffic from mobile devices.

 I am exploring various options to make our TheQuotes.Net website mobile friendly.

TheQuotes.Net site is developed using Wordpress (Few non-Wordpress pages are also available).  I came to know that installing a simple wordpress plugin will automatically make the site mobile friendly. i-e This plugin will check whether the request comes from desktop computer or from mobile device. And the web page will be rendered using Style/CSS suitable for the desktop computer if the request comes from desktop computer. Similarly mobile specific Style/CSS will be used if the request comes from the mobile device.

I prefer to use this approach, because I believe it can be done easily and it will keep same url for both Desktop devices and mobile devices. But I would like to know the impact of this plugin. i-e whether it will reduce the page loading performance as it has to detect the type of client before rendering the page.

And, there are many such plugins are available. I would like to know which plugin is best. You can share your suggestions thro' the comments.

And, I am listing below the other approaches.

I came to know about some cloud based services, which will make our site seo friendly using cloud service. They claim that the page loading performance will not be affected as their cloud services will make the web page mobile friendly on the mobile devices only after the DOM is loaded. i-e The desktop computers won't require any additional processing on both server side and client side.
These cloud based services seem to be good choice. But most of them are paid services. Some of them are free services for limited traffic. But I am NOT sure about the hidden charges or hidden issues with these free services. So, I am hesitating to use them.

The other approach is, having separate website for mobile devices. i-e creating subdomain such as mobile.thequotes.net for the mobile devices, and duplicating the site in this subdomain. It will give the flexibility to change content (i-e reduce the Page content Bytes)  for the mobile device so that the pages can be loaded quickly. But we have to do something (e.g specifying as canonical) for getting search rank penalty for duplicate content from the search engines.


Apart from making the site mobile friendly,  I plan to create an android application for showing motivational Quotes in various ways. You can add comments to mention your expectations about the motivational quotes android application.


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