The chances are that more of your WordPress website visitors are using mobiles, or more clients are demanding responsive or mobile sites. If you can use WordPress to build mobile-friendly sites you can win more business from clients and more traffic for your site.

"WordPress Mobile Web Development Beginner's Guide" will benefit you whether you’ve dabbled in WordPress or worked with it for years. It will help you identify which approach to mobile is most appropriate for your site (responsive, mobile, or web app) and learn how to make each one work, demonstrating a variety of techniques from the simple to the more complex, working through clear practical examples and applying these to your own website.

Start by quickly making a WordPress site mobile-friendly, using off the shelf plugins and responsive themes, choosing the best ones for you and customising them. This leads into responsive theme design, with advice on layout, images and navigation. Finally, learn how to build a web app in WordPress, making use of plugins, APIs and custom code.

If you need to hit the ground running with mobile WordPress development, then this book is for you. With practical examples and exercises from the beginning, it will help you build your first mobile WordPress site without having to learn aspects of WordPress or mobile development that aren't relevant. It will also help you understand which approaches work and why, so you can apply this knowledge to future projects.

What you will learn from this book

• Identify which approach to mobile development will work best for your site, by understanding the needs of the site and its visitors
• Find out which plugins and pre-built responsive themes are best for quickly making a WordPress site work on mobiles, and customize them for your site
• Install responsive themes and customise them to fit with your existing design or brand
• Make your existing WordPress theme or site responsive, adjusting the layout and interface to look great on mobiles, including phones and tablets
• Take responsive design further, with responsive text and navigation, for better ergonomics and user experience
• Learn how to make images and other media responsive and reduce their file size on mobile devices using inbuilt WordPress functionality
• Create an app-like site, with a design and interface resembling a native app
• Access the functionality of the user's phone from the browser to create a WordPress web app, and learn which features you’ll be able to use in future

Approach

Beginner's Guide

Who this book is written for

If you have dabbled in WordPress or been working with it for years, and want to build mobile or responsive themes or sites, this book is for you. Even if you can't write a line of code, the first few chapters will help you create a simple mobile site. But to get the most from the book, you will need a good understanding of HTML, CSS and WordPress itself.

This book is for owners of self-hosted WordPress sites, not sites hosted at wordpress.com.