Back in the day, you could increased traffic by leveraging social networks and sharing. But how do you attract more traffic today and into the future? The answer is mobile. Recent studies show that mobile traffic will will increase 26x from now to 2015. So f you are not thinking about a mobile version of your site, you need to start.
Ashford Pro gives you an instant mobile site without plugins or additional themes. You manage BOTH your desktop and mobile sites from the same Theme using the same content. As the framework moves into the future, it will continue with a mobile first philosophy. Each release of the code makes the mobile experience better.
What is the Ashford Mobile experience?
While most WordPress themes handle mobile through a plugin or a separate mobile theme, Ashford Pro instead embeds mobile into the theme. Using MobileESP techonology, if Ashford detects a tier-0ne mobile device, then it displays a mobile optimized version of the page requested.
Here are what we consider tier-one phones (does not include iPad).
- iPhone and iPod Touch
- Android
- BlackBerry OS 6 WebKit Browser
- WebOS
- Maemo (Nokia’s Linux touchscreen OS)
- Garmin Nuvifone
The mobile experience sends a simplified page to the mobile device:
- Simple site name and tagline for header
- Simple colors which do change based on “color style” selected in Ashford Theme Options
- Distinct mobile navigation
- All Hero Types are removed
- All Pro Layouts switch to a mobile list layout
- All sidebars are removed
- Footer navigation is removed but footer copy is retained.
The mobile experience is limited to content and mobile navigation (which is a simplified version of your full desktop navigation).
Ashford is mobile first
Ashford is evolving its theme framework to embrace a mobile first philosophy. The roadmap over the next year is to further refine and develop mobile Ashford features.