Mobile browsing hit the mainstream a few years ago with the introduction of Blackberrys and what were called smartphones. With the addition of the Apple iPhone and iTouch mobile browsing is set to finally gain the type of use that’s been projected for a while.
With that comes a whole new set of issues for website owners. While mobile browsers are built to recognize the fact that they are showing content on a really small screen, (iPhone users get to blow it all up with that nifty outward pinching motion) the typical website and blog is not very mobile friendly. And, scrolling all over while your screen refreshes is too much work for the mobile reader.
In a perfect world you could create two websites – one for standard browsers and one just to cater to the growing army of mobile readers.
Or, you can check out a new service I was recently introduced to called MoFuse.
Mofuse takes blog feeds and turns them into mobile versions of your blog. There are other services that do this, in fact, I have written about and used a service called WinkSite for about two years, but MoFuse has some very cool functionality.
- Mofuse lets you easily format the look and feel of your mobile pages including adding your own header art.
- Mofuse allows you to use some DNS masking magic to create your mobile site on your domain. My mobile site url is http://m.ducttapemarketing.com – you can have a look by clicking on the link to get an idea of what mobile browsers will see. (It’s not much to look at here but on a mobile browser it’s stunning!)
- The service makes it pretty easy to add mobile pages for your products or contact info through an online WYSIWYG HTML interface.
- They have created a script that will detect mobile browsers to your WordPress, TypePad or Blogger blog and automatically show the mobile pages when a mobile browser visits your blog pages.