A Comprehensive Guide on Creating a Mobile Friendly Drupal Website

By emily, 10 December, 2014
A Comprehensive Guide on Creating a Mobile Friendly Drupal Website

The increasing usage and popularity of mobile devices and hyper-competitive business environment have made it extremely hard for the marketers, organizations, and webmasters to retain their business without developing a mobile-friendly website. Mobile development skills are gaining prominence since mobile devices are often used for mobile surfing and information gathering. And, Drupal- a leading CMS platform provides a lot of opportunities to develop brilliant responsive and adaptive websites.

This article deals with the steps and procedures involved for developing a Drupal website which runs smoothly across a wide range of mobile devices. Before you start the process, keep in mind that there are plethora of options available which help you build a mobile version of your website. Also, probably there are people who would like to go on with some responsive themes to get their website optimized for mobiles. They also work nice.

Apart from this, if you want a complete responsive website, then you'd like to follow the method which I am going to reveal below. So, let's get started.

1. Getting Multiple Domain

Drupal comes with a module namely Domain Access that allows you a great level of flexibility when it comes to serving multiple domains for both standard and mobile websites. It's a simple process, all you need is just enable the Domain Access, and after it you'll be provided with two different versions of the website running on different domains. For added functionality, you can choose themes for both of them and customize them to suit your needs. There are plenty of other modules as well which can be integrated well with Domain Access to enjoy the range of options for an added edge.

2. Redirecting The Visitors to the Targeted Version

Here, it's time to get your domain introduced with each other and you'll need to use the below mentioned modules for switching/redirecting between them. The modules are:

Mobile Domain: the mobile domain is basically a collection of tools that enable you build a mobile version of your website using multiple domains. It comes with two variable, one for specifying the domains for each them, and another for keeping an alternative domain. The component could be easily configured with different variables per domain.

Mobile Domain Switch: the component automatically switches between domains depending upon the type of device. It also provides users options to switch back to previous domain. Browscap element is used in both of the modules in order to redirect the device to the targeted version.

3. Deploying Complete Control on Presentation

Now, the time has come to install different themes for each version. It's a good method to enjoy a full level of control when it comes to configuring blocks for each of the version separately. Drupal website owners have the facility to set different functions for their mobile as well as desktop website. For example: they can choose to show some posts while blocking a few of them. At the same time, they can present a list of content in an entirely different format on mobile versions. The settings called 'Number of Posts in main page' allows you do that nicely by switching the variable value for each of the domain.

Additionally, if you want to display the teaser list differently for each version, there are modules known as 'Mobile teaser' and a 'mobile full' display modes that helps you present the teaser list with ease.

4. Informing The Search Engine Crawlers

So, you have effectively built a mobile-friendly website, now, what's next? You want to make your website searched by the end users, right? But how would plan it? Obviously, by informing search engine crawlers about the existence of your website.

Thus Drupal simplifies and speeds up the process of developing a mobile-friendly website the help of its modules and tools. Hence, making it extremely easy to render a mobile-optimized content to the readers. Hopefully, you enjoyed the article and will surely bookmark it for the future reference.

About Author: Emily Heming is an iPhone app developer for Xicom Technologies a leading provider of iPhone app development services which also offers the reliable service to avail iOS programmers for hire with her best assistance.