After writing this post about what I see as a significant lacking feature in the default WP (WordPress) installation, I got to thinking about another component that I believe should be standard and included in the default install.
As with that last post, I’ll emphasize again that I love WP and think its fantastic. An 11 on the scale from 1 to 10, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some room for improvements still, and here’s a functional application that I believe should be a standard feature with WP out of the box: an auto device detection and text based mobile device page delivery system. There should be a default “mobile device” theme for this that’s used.
When someone visits from a PDA or other older (than 6 months) handheld device WP should recognize that and serve up pages in pure XHTML without any layout styling that slows the download and/or detracts from the visitor’s experience.
There’s several plugins that can do this, and I use one on this blog called WordPress Mobile Edition, but given the nature of blogging, bloggers and those who follow blogs–a very mobile crowd–this feature just seems like something that should be a standard component on the best blogging platform.
I visit tons of blogs every day, often from my PocketPC or even my Phone while on the move and I can’t tell you how many times I reach a blog and have to wait crazy lengths of time for pages to download because of bloated graphics and scripts that don’t work on the device anyway, and often the pages look like crap on the device because the formatting gets skewed.
I know this is a problem on the device end more than anything else in not handling the displays better, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed by the blog (as a known issue) to ensure a better visitor experience regardless of what display device is being used.
It can be said that this is why plugins are such a big part of WP, and that’s even supported by the fact that plugins exist to address this very issue, but because I see it as a platform functional issue rather than a feature since it affects how the blog presents data for display to some users it just seems to me that it probably should be something built into the application core.
And if it worked using a default mobile device theme, bloggers could still customize it as they see fit for personalization, or to add default advertising if they wanted.
Again, this isn’t a rant against WP. I really love the software. But I believe this would (and should) be a giant step to further separate WP from the rest of the pack.
I’ve mentioned previously that I have over 80 blogs on my daily reading list in just the money making genre alone, and only 12 of them are mobile device friendly at this time…which means that there are 68 blogs I don’t visit as often as I would otherwise. And I’m not the only one like this I know, because I saw in this site’s stats after I added the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin that my return visitors jumped by over 8% almost overnight, which tells me that a lot of people were turned away because of formatting previously. To me, that’s a problem, and since its a problem with how data is presented to some visitors I’d like to someday see it addressed at the core rather than with plugins.
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