Showcase of 20 Mobile-Friendly Popular Design Blogs

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:53:26 +0000

Roughly 3-4% of our readers view this site via a mobile device and that percentage is growing week-to-week. They aren’t very high percentages but it was certainly high enough to prompt me into action – I started considering a mobile version of this site.

Let me start by saying that I didn’t want it look like an entirely stripped down version of the full site. I did want to keep the overall layout of the hompage (thumbnails and excerpt), I wanted the internal post images to be re-sized per screen rather than cropped, and most importantly, I wanted the essence of the site, albeit in smaller mode, to reflect on the mobile version.
I experimented with a few Wordpress plugins, for some sites these plugins may be powerful enough, but not for me, I wanted more functionality. I also tried a few web services, I wasn’t too happy with them either.

Eventually I chanced upon the solution while browsing WebDesigner Depot on my HTC Hero (much better than the iPhone!), and there mobile site just looked amazing. It has the appearance of a mobile app while still maintaining the integrity and functionality of the full site. I went digging and found out that they were using Mobify, a web service were you can design a mobile layout for your website exactly how you want.

I since discovered that a lot of design blogs were also using Mobify (Smashing Magazine and Abduzeedo to name a couple), so I jumped in and tried it. You can see from the screenshot below what I have built, and it actually wasn’t that hard nor did it test the patience. Speckyboy-Lite looks not too bad:

View Speckyboy Design Magazine Mobile Version »

Mobify Overview

In case you were wondering what Mobify is all about, have a look at this short video below.

Below you will find 20 mobile versions of popular design blogs designed with Mobify. Its best if you view this page with a mobile device as to get the full viewing benefit and fully experiencing there mobile versions. Why not bookmark them all as well.