Make a mobile website

On 11/01/2013

In News

The new year is off to a great start, with a brand new online website manager up and running, designed to help you make a website a whole lot more quickly and easily. As we talked about a few weeks ago we’ve also been working on a simple way to help you quickly transform your regular websites to mobile websites. It’s now ready to move into an public beta test, so you can start trying it out on your website from today.

Create mobile websites, easily

The new mobile website design themes are just that: themes you’ll apply to your website, so that visitors accessing your site from a mobile device, like a smartphone or a tablet, can access a different site layout that makes it easier to display and navigate through site content on smaller screens. You don’t need to duplicate your work or site pages to create mobile websites - simply enable the mobile access option in the site manager, and your existing website will be good to go.

 

Make your website mobile-ready

To enable a mobile version of your website, simply check the box under the Settings > Global settings > Mobile access menu in your site manager, and save. That’s it – visitors accessing your site from a regular computer will continue to view the same site they’ve always seen. Enabling the mobile access option changes nothing for most visitors, doesn’t alter your site design and layout, and won’t change your site content.

Visitors accessing the site from a mobile device like an iPhone will view a different site design, with mobile-specific site navigation, and from a mobile-ready site address (http://m.yourwebsite.com). Your current site content will still be displayed at its regular address; only your site design layout will change, to help people viewing the site on smaller screens better see and navigate through your site content.

 

Edit your mobile website design

Just like your regular site design, you can adjust the look of your mobile-specific site design from the site manager, and none of the changes you make to your mobile site design will affect your regular site design. To edit your mobile website design, just head to the Settings > Design > Personalize mobile site design menu.

 

During this initial test phase, there are just a few ready-made mobile design themes available. There’ll be a whole lot more published over the coming weeks and months, so check back from time to time to try out new ones as they’re published. And as always, if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions about the new mobile websites, get in touch with the support team from the Help > Online support menu of the site manager.