AdWords Retiring Google Mobile Business Pages – Quick Mobile Site Creation Guide

Posted: February 17, 2009

Search Engine Land recently reported that Google was removing their mobile business pages. These were pages where you could enter some business information and then drive users from your mobile ads to these pages instead of to your website.

Personally, the pages weren’t useful as you didn’t have much control over the formatting, and couldn’t really make a nice mobile page.

The easiest way to make a mobile site is to first install WordPress. Secondly, install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in.

If you are using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

FTP & Enable the plug-in
Do not make the mobile template the default template. The plug-in will detect if the mobile version needs to be triggered.
Customize the mobile template as much as you desire (you can upload an image, change the navigation to your main pages, etc)

If you are not using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

This is the low tech approach to a mobile page. This option should only be used if:

You don’t want to pay someone to design your site for mobile devices
You don’t have the budget for a full mobile compliant site
You just need a site to let a visitor know your locations, phone number, and basic information etc on a mobile phone
You want a cheap option to display a mobile page while your testing out the effectiveness of mobile advertising

WordPress is a blogging platform, but in this case we’re just using it for a few mobile pages; here’s my suggestions

Create a subdomain (like mobile.yoursite.com)
Install WordPress in that subdomain
Install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in
Use the mobile edition theme as your default theme
Customize the mobile edition to fit your website’s overall color and design scheme

You will need to be able to create a subdomain, mysql database, and have ftp access to your site. Pretty much everyone using Plesk or cPanel for their hosting control panel have these abilities.

Final notes on time:

If you’ve never played with WordPress before, making your site mobile compatible will take a couple hours. The installation is easy. The control panel is also easy to navigate. WordPress is very easy to use. However, since it is a new system that you’ve never seen – allow 2-3 hours of time.

If you’ve used WordPress before, making your site Mobile compatible will take 5 minutes of time, plus however long you wish to spend customizing the theme after installation.

If you do not want to use WordPress…

There are other easy ways to create mobile pages. Most of them are 3rd party hosting systems. As I’m a huge fan of controlling your site, I’d recommend you host this yourself if possible.

If you cannot, then browse around the web and choose one of the many options currently available. If you like it, please post a comment here (or contact me) so we can recommend other good mobile hosting options. Thank you.

Share and Enjoy:

Related Information:

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Mobile

Comments

4 Responses to “AdWords Retiring Google Mobile Business Pages – Quick Mobile Site Creation Guide”

AdWords Mobile Pages Officially Close | bg Theory, LLC on May 7th, 2009 6:59 am

[...] a reminder, here’s a guide to make a quick Wordpress mobile site if you want to either move your Google mobile page, or test out mobile advertising. Share and [...]
Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns | bg Theory, LLC on June 23rd, 2009 10:44 am

[...] How to create a mobile website [...]
mrugesh on July 23rd, 2009 5:34 am

hello,

Your article is very nice.

My wordpress is installed on root. Now I want to create subdomain and I want my normal site at “mysite.com” and mobile version at “m.mysite.com”

How can I do that ? I mean to say single database, single installation but mobile version on subdomain.

here is example :

normal site :
http://carringtontheme.com/

and mobile site :
http://mobile.carringtontheme.com/

I want similar.
Any help please ?
Brad Geddes aka eWhisper on July 23rd, 2009 7:37 am

I’m not aware of a wordpress plugin that lets you publish different info to a subdomain.

Since things like domain are kept in the wordpress database, I don’t think you can have a single database going to two different sites. If you had a plugin that only looked at the DB for comments, pages, and posts, and then had it’s on information stored locally, then it might work – but without some custom coding – I’m not sure how you would set that up.

The two most likely developers who would know are Alex King (alexking.org) or Joost de Valk (yoast.com).