LightSpeed » mobile

Mobile Commerce for WordPress

Barend Potgieter — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:59:53 +0000

Mobile Commerce solutions for WordPress powered websites have become a necessity as the mobile device continues its unstoppable rise as the main gateway to the internet for South African users.

Independent mobile ad network InMobi, has recently released their latest research report on mobile advertising and mobile commerce. The report has some very interesting findings and indicates that mobile commerce is showing signs of record growth in Africa and across the Asian Pacific.

According to InMobi’s findings, 59% of South African users have now purchased at least one digital product through their mobile device. James Lamberti, Vice President Global Research & Marketing at InMobi, said that mobile commerce has become quite common in Africa, and that it is a very promising and thrilling opportunity for the consumer, retailer, and manufacturer as mobile shopping solutions will become more accessible, intelligent and compelling to use.

Mobile Commerce data on your Mobile device

We use the phenomenal WPtouch Pro plugin to create mobile versions of our WordPress websites for our clients. Now, Brave new Code, the same masterminds behind WPtouch Pro have recently released Piggy.

Piggy is a web-app that provides mobile access to bring sales data for your WordPress E-Commerce powered WordPress website straight to your mobile device. Sales Managers and Business owners can now have up to the minute sales information and stats on the go. It works on iOS and Android, is quick to install, easy to use and provides you with all the sales data you want to view as long as you are connected to the internet.

Other features include:

Sales forecasting
Live Updating
Multiple Colour layouts
Full support for 13 languages

Using WPtouch Pro and Piggy in combination you can optimize your website for Mobile, and stay on top of the data as your e-Commerce store takes off in the mobile market.

Mobile Communities with BuddyPress and Wptouch

Barend Potgieter — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:36:32 +0000

“Mobile design has become an essential component of a successful, compatible website.” – Smashing Magazine

In 2007 Nokia released the N95 smartphonewith the tagline: “It’s what computers have become”. They had a catchy marketing campaign with various users responding to the question of what they would call a one device that could do everything they needed. Response ranged from: “My everything”, “My window on the world”, “My best mate”, “My little magical treat”, “My life-support system” and “My right hand” to “El Presidente” and “The Future”.Now, mobile phones have come some way since the Nokia N95 and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers are poised to topple the humble desktop computer as the average person’s computer of choice.The implication of this is that in the near future most people will not access your website from a laptop or desktop PC, but from a mobile device. The problem is that websites behave differently when displayed on these smaller screen devices.

At LightSpeed we choose Mobile Web development over the development of mobile apps, because this extends your existing web presence to mobile, allowing you to still only maintain one website instead of a website and a mobile app.

We’ve been pursuing mobile solutions for WordPress and BuddyPress for quite some time and as mentioned in our previous post – The Future is mobile – LightSpeed uses the WPtouch Pro plugin to make your website viewable on all smartphones and tablet PC’s. Where WPtouch is not enough, we also offer custom development to give you a mobile website that perfectly suits your specific business needs.

Some of our Custom development includes:

BuddyPress Integration

Shape Magazine required a solution that would enable their readers to access tailored content on the go. This included the ability to read and post recipes, training logs and food journals to their Shape profiles, and accessing the Shape Magazinecommunity from anywhere – the gym, office, beach or home.By using WPtouch, we were able to render a mobile version of their website that is viewable on any smartphone, extending their web presence to mobile devices. A custom Integration of BuddyPress and Wptouch, allowed us to enable the community features of BuddyPressfor the Shape mobile website. These community features include everything you expect from a social network, including personlized profiles, activity streams, friends, private messaging and journal (custom post type) posting.

Custom Warning Messages

When viewing our mobile sites from a cell phone or mobile that is not able to view it, we have warning messages included, informing the user of possible problems with display of the content and what can be done to remedy the situation.This was done for Shape Magazine, where Blackberries running Blackberry 5 would receive the warning message that their Operating System (OS) is not up to date and they need to have WebKitinstalled in order to view the mobile site. This customization is based on user agent and can be built for any make of phone and OS.A user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system. The user agents identify their software as part of the client–server conversation. This string is then used by the your website to characterize the client (The user’s device – or smartphone) and select suitable, properly formatted content and operating parameters for the user’s smartphone.

With all these technologies at your disposal it is clear that a mobile website need not be inferior to your normal web site and that you can not only offer value to your users, but also content targeted specifically at your growing mobile user base through your mobile website.

If you are looking for bleeding edge WordPress based web development that caters for mobile devices, look no further than our Mobile package and contact us.

Mobile Themes for WordPress

Ashley Shaw — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:37:49 +0000

The Future is Mobile – Are you?

Mobile internet access is growing at a staggering pace. In this changing technological environment it has become ever more prudent to have your WordPress powered business website mobile compatible in order to reach this expanding market of web savvy South Africans.

As reported in The Sunday Times this past Sunday, the sale of smartphones has just surpassed the sale of PCs for the first time. This was not expected to happen until 2012.

A recent study by Arthur Goldstuck’s World Wide Worx, the Mobility 2011 research project, reveals even more interesting facts. The project’s findings are that 39% of urban South Africans and 27% of rural users are now browsing the Internet on their phones. The study excludes “deep rural” users, and represents around 20-million South Africans aged 16 and above. This means that at least 6-million South Africans now have Internet access on their phones.

This is a bit of a jump from Internet World Stats 2009 statsistics that showed total (not just Mobile) South Africans with internet access to be at 5.3 million.

Increasingly, smartphones and mobile technologies such as tablet PCs are the first point of entry for many into the online world. Right now – and set to increase over the next couple of years – people who have never had any contact with the internet are making their first contact through the use of mobile telephones. When taking into account that greater competition in the mobile handset market, specifically the market for smartphones, will be driving prices down for these devices, not having a web presence that is mobile device compatible seems like a big strategic over sight.

Really, in the past it has been said that if you don’t have a web presence, your business will lose out. This remains true, but now this has also shifted:

Having a web presence is good, but having a mobile compatible web presence is better.

WPtouch

At LightSpeed we use the impressive plugin, WPtouch to make our websites mobile compatible. WP Touch works by detecting supported devices like iPhones, iPads, Android, Blackberry and more, serving its optimized theme instead of your regular desktop theme. Visitors can always switch back to your desktop theme if they choose.

Recent clients have included Shape magazine, Mom2Mom and Runner’s World.

Shape magazine is one of our South African magazines with an excellent web savvy. Measured against other South African magazines shows Shape to rank #6 for media presence on Facebook and #20 on Twitter according to my estimated cross reference with the figures posted by Media Slut in their recent blog.

Shape magazine knows what it’s doing on the web, and at LightSpeed we know how to enable our clients to make the most of their online business strategy. Contact us for further information on a mobile compatible website for your business and take advantage of the mobile future.

Mobile theme and tools for buddypress needed

Ashley Shaw — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:07:33 +0000

I have noticed lately that all the major social media and social networking websites are coming out with a mobile version of their website hosted like this – m.socialsite.com – If you view it in a browser it looks like an extremely stripped down version of the main website. Click on these websites and see for yourself:

My suggestion is as follows:

Create a theme for BuddyPress
The theme needs to include with a bunch of mobile tools
The tools should include a mobile optimized website at m.socialsite.com
Users needs an easy way to upload photos and notes to the website via SMS and MMS messages
Users should also be able to receive new BuddyPress messages on their phones via SMS, but might be costly to implement.

A well-known South African blogger called Matthew Buckland wrote and awesome article on the future of the mobile internet. Read the article if you are interested in in what I am talking about.

I am going to write next about how I see a need for combining the mobile theme with a Jabber Client to allow users to chat anywhere, connect and grow the network in their geographic location.

Please give feedback?