Mobify.me enters competitive mobile creation market with a custom CSS offer

Newly launched Mobify.meis the recent creation of mobile applications developers Handi Mobility, of Vancouver, Canada.

Val Halla Mobify.me site

Mobify provides a quick and easy way for web designers to create a mobile view of their websites, without the hassle of building an entirely separate mobile site, and with more customization than using an automatic transcoder.

Users of Mobify will be able to first select certain “blocks” of information off their full site, most likely the content they see as important and relevant to mobile users, and second have the ability to style the content with CSS. Mobify will take care of device recognition, resizing the images, feature detection, and matching templates. All these services are set in place to help insure a mobile site’s download time is as fast as possible for viewers.

A bonus of Mobify, being that it is a hosted service, is that no downloading or software installation is required, and designers can link their custom domain name to redirect to their Mobify site. When viewers arrive at “yoursite.com” for example, a provided script will ”sniff out” that they are a mobile browser viewer, and present them with your mobile homepage instead of your full one. There is a free package on Mobify, which allows designers to create 3 mobile web pages, but if you wish to take advantage of the DNS CNAME REDIRECT service just discussed, there is a yearly $10 fee. There is also the ability to Mobify as many or as few pages from your site as you wish, as well as many other more in depth features, for monthly subscription prices.

Mobify users are also able to upload an icon that will show up for visitors who save your mobile site to their mobile homescreens, to add that extra personal touch!

It all SOUNDS pretty interesting, but let’s see it in action!
To demonstrate the capabilities and practical use of Mobify, the company has taken the homepage for my website, and “Mobify-ed” it.

Above is the Mobify version of my www.valhallaonline.com website.

The Taste Test!

I wanted to know how Mobify would sit in the opinion of an experienced web designer using the program for the first time, and not solely rely on the word of the actual developers. So I called up the designer of my website Ken Varas, and asked him to use the program to make one of the other pages on my site optimized for mobile viewing.

Ken chose the Biography page of the website, and after only 15 minutes on Mobify.me, had created a mobile version of the page that he felt would download quickly and still be effective for interacting with a mobile viewer.

Here are the comparisons of the full site Bio page, and the mobile page Ken created in 15 minutes using Mobify.me. Full site Bio page:

New custom site

As you can see, Ken selected not to include an image in the header at all, for easy viewing of the mobile site. It’s these kind of decisions that can be uniquely made according to each designer’s preference. Also multiple ideas can be tried before having to save any changes. Every coding change that a designer makes is automatically displayed, allowing for some experimentation before anything is “set in stone”.

Ken told me this was one of his favorite features. “You could see the changes in the preview pane live, on the right of the screen. When you’re ready, just hit save and all changes made are, only then, made to the live site. $#@% yeah!”

So What is the Final Verdict?

The program simplifies a job that many web designers may find themselves executing in the near future, if they aren’t already, as more and more people begin to access websites from their mobile devices. Designers who desire absolute control, may still prefer coding a mobile site themselves, but it is hard to argue with Mobify’s easy to use interface, and hassle free conversion. Having a site like this on your side could save you hours, days, or even months depending on the job!

This site will mean the most to those people who might not be at the point where they can sit down and program 10 different mobile pages on their own site in a couple of hours, but who have a basic working knowledge of CSS, and need to get something up and running for their mobile viewers NOW.

Mobify also offers design packages to those people who may find themselves in a similar situation as me, running a website for personal or business reasons on a limited budget, and needing to go mobile. Because Mobify can use their own program to convert your site, they offer quite a reasonable rate. Just look at it this way – with Mobify, you get your own personal Ken Varas on your side!