It’s always fun to see more quality mobile views launched using Mobify. Here are some of the recent ones that we like the most (even including one for a Saturday Night Live producer)!

Continue reading »

One of the things we often wished for at Mobify is growing a real community around mobile web design. Here and there on the Web one might find groups of people interested in the subject. However, there’s never been a successful venue where one can get definitive answers on all relevant topics, help with developing the mobile version or advice about promoting it. Today, we’re proud to be launching Mobify Community – the social component of Mobify.

We’ve got three goals for it and we need your help to achieve all of them:

1) Create world’s leading resource for best practices, guides and tools related to mobile web design. If you’re wondering about designing websites for the Motorola Droid, or need to know if Blackberry Storm supports float elements, the Community is the place to go to. The ever-expanding Guides section should answer most of your Mobify-related questions. We’ll also work hard to get service vendors like DeviceAnywhere and PerfectoMobile to provide discounts and special offers to all of our members.

2) Connect site owners and mobile web designers in an effective mobile marketplace. Mobify is built to let web designers create amazing mobile experiences. This also means that some of our users prefer having a professional develop their mobile presence (and they’re willing to pay for it!). Visit the Job Board if you’re a web designer looking for new projects or a site owner looking to hire.

3) Have fun and get to know each other : ). Since Mobify launched, we’ve exchanged thousands of emails with fantastic people all around the world. Let’s get together to create the beautiful, effective and fast mobile web of tomorrow.

The Mobify Community is still young – please, come on in and introduce yourself!

We love covering success stories of web designers going mobile. Today we caught up with Aaron Maxwell, president of Hilomath, a fast-growing mobile web development agency out of San Francisco. Their key offering is a mobile website upgrade service they called MobileWebUp. It’s tailored to clients that already have a substantial web presence, and suddenly realize it needs to also work well on mobile.

Mobify: What made you start designing for mobile?

Aaron: Having developed web apps in Silicon Valley for years, I was ready to start my own agency and build a team of designers and engineers. The question was what business focus would have potential for growth in the coming years, as well as making an important contribution to small and mid-sized businesses (a sector I personally enjoy working with).

One day while quietly sitting and mulling it over, it somehow popped into my head that helping businesses reach their best prospects and clients through mobile handhelds met all the criteria. After a few weeks of market research, I was convinced.

There is an even bigger motivation, which wasn’t obvious to me at the beginning. You see, the mobile internet isn’t just another shiny new technology. This shift to making the web truly mobile – which is happening right now, and will take several years to play out – is, in my opinion, going to prove historically significant. It is truly a new mass media, whose reach and power is likely to exceed radio, TV, perhaps even the desktop-oriented Internet.

I believe its emergence will go down in history books as one of humanity’s milestones, nearly up there with the emergence of the Internet itself. Who WOULDN’T want to be involved in that?

(And by the way, if you’re a web designer who wants to get paid to use Mobify to help build the mobile web, send a message to jobs@hilomath.com now
Continue reading »

After weeks of hard work, we’re proud to present you with a big update to Mobify. Even more improvements are already underway. Here are the highlights:

• Support for Google Analytics for Mobile. Recently announced by Google, this API allows for extra precision in mobile reporting, especially critical for sites with BlackBerry and feature phones. The direct GA API is available to Plus and Pro websites.
• Faster mobifying of WordPress, Drupal and ExpressionEngine websites. To make mobifying even faster, we trained the AI to be more helpful with picking content and populating templates. If you see mobile content pre-picked when loading a page, or templates mobified in the background, this is what’s going on.
• Better Support for IE 7 & 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome in Choose / Design. Internet Explorer users rejoice, as now it’s a lot more stable – a large part of the interface has been rewritten from scratch to make that possible. We still recommend FireFox : )
• Revision Control. A must for any website with a large mobile audience. Copy revisions and switch back and forth between them, making the design process smoother and risk-free.
• New Manage Screen. Multiple tabs are gone, with a birds-eye view of the mobile view taking its place.
• Embeds for Gallery Entries. Every gallery-approved website now features two snippets (small and large) useful for promoting the mobile version in a blog, forum or a site sidebar. An example embed for YankoDesign can be seen below. Go to the Gallery in order to get your embeds today!

Several features are still in testing and will be gradually rolled out over the next week or two. Please let us know what you think of the new Mobify in comments below. Hope you like it!