What this book covers

Chapter 1, Using Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-friendly, will introduce you to some plugins you can use to quickly make your content more accessible to people visiting the site on mobiles. It will help you choose the right plugin for your site and show you how to configure some of the most useful ones that are available right now.

Chapter 2, Using Responsive Themes, will introduce you to themes, which have a built-in mobile-friendly stylesheet. It will help you identify some of the best ones, figure out if that’s the best approach for your site, and configure and tweak those themes.

Chapter 3, Setting up Media Queries, is where we will start to work with CSS for the responsive design. You’ll learn how to add media queries to your theme’s stylesheet to identify when visitors are viewing the site on a mobile device.

Chapter 4, Adjusting the Layout, deals with the most fundamental aspect of responsive design. Here, we’ll explore ways to adjust the layout of the site so that it looks better on mobiles, including tweaking settings for headers, sidebars, and footers.

Chapter 5, Working with Text and Navigation, will introduce you to the most effective ways to deliver text to mobiles. We’ll make sure the text in our content reads well on small screens and explore the use of ems instead of pixels to aid with, responsive design.

Chapter 6, Optimizing Images and Video, will take you through different approaches to optimize images and media. We’ll look at ways to not only make images appear smaller, but also to make sure smaller files are being delivered to mobile devices, saving on load times and data use. We’ll also examine ways to deliver video and other media to mobiles.

Chapter 7, Sending Different Content to Different Devices, will take you through setting up the Carborelli’s site so that its navigation differs on mobile devices and makes it easier for visitors to get to what they need quickly, as the visitors to your site may want quick access to different information depending on what kind of device they’re using.

Chapter 8, Creating a Web App Interface, covers the use of CSS to make the mobile version of your site appear like a native app. We’ll make changes to the Carborelli’s home page, and navigation in particular, to create a really memorable mobile site.

Chapter 9, Adding Web App Functionality, will lead you further into the realm of web apps. You’ll learn about plugins and APIs that harness the functionality of the mobile device and give the user a more app-like experience. We’ll also start to explore mobile commerce by working on the e-commerce section of Carborelli’s site.

Chapter 10, Testing and Updating your Mobile Site, will take you through the pros and cons of testing on actual mobile devices, different methods to emulate mobile devices in a desktop browser, and how to update and edit our site using a mobile device. A mobile-friendly site needs to work in a variety of browsers on a large array of mobile devices. You’ll learn how to simulate some of these devices without actually owning them, and which devices it’s useful to own or borrow to simulate the full user experience, particularly to test web apps.