Search Engine Land recently reported that Google was removing their mobile business pages. These were pages where you could enter some business information and then drive users from your mobile ads to these pages instead of to your website.

Personally, the pages weren’t useful as you didn’t have much control over the formatting, and couldn’t really make a nice mobile page.

The easiest way to make a mobile site is to first install WordPress. Secondly, install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in.

If you are using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

• FTP & Enable the plug-in
• Do not make the mobile template the default template. The plug-in will detect if the mobile version needs to be triggered.
• Customize the mobile template as much as you desire (you can upload an image, change the navigation to your main pages, etc)

If you are not using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

This is the low tech approach to a mobile page. This option should only be used if:

• You don’t want to pay someone to design your site for mobile devices
• You don’t have the budget for a full mobile compliant site
• You just need a site to let a visitor know your locations, phone number, and basic information etc on a mobile phone
• You want a cheap option to display a mobile page while your testing out the effectiveness of mobile advertising

WordPress is a blogging platform, but in this case we’re just using it for a few mobile pages; here’s my suggestions

• Create a subdomain (like mobile.yoursite.com)
• Install WordPress in that subdomain
• Install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in
• Use the mobile edition theme as your default theme
• Customize the mobile edition to fit your website’s overall color and design scheme

You will need to be able to create a subdomain, mysql database, and have ftp access to your site. Pretty much everyone using Plesk or cPanel for their hosting control panel have these abilities.

Final notes on time:

If you’ve never played with WordPress before, making your site mobile compatible will take a couple hours. The installation is easy. The control panel is also easy to navigate. WordPress is very easy to use. However, since it is a new system that you’ve never seen – allow 2-3 hours of time.

If you’ve used WordPress before, making your site Mobile compatible will take 5 minutes of time, plus however long you wish to spend customizing the theme after installation.

If you do not want to use WordPress…

There are other easy ways to create mobile pages. Most of them are 3rd party hosting systems. As I’m a huge fan of controlling your site, I’d recommend you host this yourself if possible.

If you cannot, then browse around the web and choose one of the many options currently available. If you like it, please post a comment here (or contact me) so we can recommend other good mobile hosting options. Thank you.

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