The Best Way to Build a Mobile Site.

Well JumpMobi is the exception for building mobile Websites using Wordpress. They Have went above the bar. That's what I use and it is the best. Do I search for JumpMobi in the forum

I disagree with you that WordPress is not a good solution when its used with certain mobile specific addons. Not all WP Mobile solutions are built the same, but there are some that address your concerns and make WordPress a very good solution for mobile. I will agree with you however that an out of the box WordPress install with no specific mobile addons and lots of plugins and a responsive layout will have slow page load times for mobile visitors and this is exactly the reason I developed our solution!

I spent two years developing a specific mobile solution for WordPress that addresses and dismiss all of the issues that people tend to have with regards to mobile and WordPress including that of page load speeds and code bloat.

In the last 12 months we have well over 1000+ users like SiLew that would disagree that WordPress is not a good platform for mobile.

I have been developing for mobile since the days of WAP so am pretty familiar with the concept of best design practices for mobile, and while i agree with you that HTML5 and Javascript is also the way forward for mobile which is what we use in our solution, for a true mobile experience you can not discount the other mobile users who are not using smartphones and dont necessarily have browsers that support HTML5 and Javascript. Which is why we also use a RESS/Adaptive approach meaning that everything from the DocType, HTML, Images, CSS, Multimedia and all other resources that get loaded are not just optimized but also are the most compatible for the type of phone accessing it so it offers the best overall end user experience.

Take Google for example as simple as their main search page is look at it on different devices, desktop, tablet, smartphone, feature phone, older blackberry, old school flip phone - they dont use a responsive layout but instead use RESS/Adaptive approach to present the most compatible version for the device accessing it.

Responsive is great but really isn't the silver bullet that most people think it is for mobile, we recommend you use responsive for desktop and tablet users and then add a RESS/Adaptive layer for mobile users that compliments the aesthetics of your responsive site.

For WordPress we offer that solution by making our theme be a secondary active theme when installed installed on an existing WordPress installation. What this mean is that the default active theme is presented to desktop and tablet users, and that our theme is presented for your mobile visitors. Think of it like a theme switcher.

Many people aware of mobile don't even know about RESS/Adaptive mobile optimization and just think in terms of responsive or standalone mobile optimized sites, you will find however a lot of corporate websites, particularly those aimed at retail use this approach since they want to present the best overall end mobile user experience plus they can afford to pay a team of developers to do this.

For a lot of day to day designeers/developers don't user RESS/Adaptive approach simply because there are not many readily out of the box solutions available, and developing your own solution is complex and expensive - that's why we developed ours!

Other solutions that you can look at that do things similar to what we offer but tend to have less features, are WPTouch, and theme switching plugins too for WordPress... with the exception of WPTouch without additional knowledge and insight you will run in to issues like page load speed.

Hope that helps

Cheers,

Jay