Tag Archives: iPhone

Do You Brand Your Blog for the iPhone?

A post by Ted Murphy about how to take a screenshot of your iPhone made me think about branding and the iPhone. Ted always makes me think about branding because he does it so very well. However, as I discovered, he and many other high quality brand market gurus have not branded well for the iPhone & iPod Touch. Sorry Ted, but here is my chance to educate you a little and I’m not gonna bark at you like a deranged little league parent at 5:30am. Okay, watching that video again wasn’t so bad, it was actually a bit motivating. Maybe I was biased last time I watched that video because I had just finished a Golden Girls Marathon. But seriously, I like Ted, he is great at what he does and he can take a little constructive criticism. He’s been taking so much un-constructive criticism for years, so this little post from me should be a cake walk.

Branding for the iPhone & iPod Touch

I am shocked at how many big name bloggers haven’t taken the time to install a couple simple and free plugins to make their blogs more reader friendly for the iPhone & iPod Touch and to support branding. A quick look at

shows me that their blogs are not optimized for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Ted Murphy’s blog actually is somewhat formatted for the iPhone & iPod Touch, but not as well as BenSpark.com is. In order to optimize your blog for the iPhone & iPod Touch you should be using one simple but very powerful plugin.

Wptouch Plugin by Brave New Code

The WPtouch plugin makes formatting changes to your blog automatic so that iPhone/iTouch readers get a valuable user experience. I wrote about the WPtouch plugin once before but this time I’m focusing a bit more on branding. This plugin will automatically format your blog to be easily readable on the iPhone or iPod Touch. This means that images will be formatted to screen size automatically, the user experience is clean and simple. Users also have the option to view your blog as they would on a full browser. However, I have found that viewing a blog like you would in a full size browser is very hard to enjoy, what with all the pinching and squeezing and moving the screen around. No, WPtouch makes everything very nice.

Sure it looks nicer but what about branding?

Another thing that WPtouch allows for is branding by the use of icons for the iPhone or iPod Touch home screen, and you even see your branded icon at the top right of the screen when you view your blog. Take a look at this screen shot to see what I mean. This is the home screen of my iPod Touch. Notice the icon for BenSpark and the icon for Ted Murphy?

Branded home page icons

WPtouch allows you to add a home screen icon to your blog. That icon will automatically show up when users want to add your blog to their home screen for quick and easy access back to your blog.

Adding BenSpark.com to your Home Screen

Add Benspark.com to you home screen

Here is where you can add Benspark.com to a Home screen on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Notice that there is a branded icon.

Adding Ted.me to your Home Screen

tedad

Here is where you can add Ted.me to a Home screen on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Notice that there is no branded icon.

The instructions for adding the iPhone/iTouch icon to your blog with WPtouch might be a little beyond the average user, you have to FTP it to a folder in that plugin folder. An easier way to add not only an iPhone/iTouch icon but also a favicon and an RSS icon is to use the plugin Blog icons. Make sure your icon is the correct size and also a .png format, that seems to be the only format that works with the uploading option on this plugin. However if you’ve already uploaded the icons somewhere else you can easily link to them.

How else does WPtouch make your blog stand out

When a reader visits a blog using WPtouch they see the blog title and blog icon at the top of the screen. There is also a search function and a drop down menu where users can subscribe to the RSS feed, e-mail the blog owner or return to the Home page of the blog. This bar appears on each page as the reader browses your blog.

BenSpark.com Home page on iTouch

This is the page that viewers see initially when they look at BenSpark.com on the iTouch. Notice the branded logo on the top of the screen. There is a search option and a drop down menu, Individual posts are big and bold with categories, a listing of the number of comments, the date is also clearly shown as well as the author.

For most blogs when you visit them on the iTouch you see the full size blog squished down, so then you have to wait for all the icons, advertising and everything else to load. WPtouch enabled blogs load much quicker. Ted may or may not be using WPtouch. If he is then he is using a stripped down version, if he is not then he is using something that makes his blog load quicker on the iPhone. He’s a self proclaimed Apple Fanboy so you know he’s going to know how to make the blog itself look good on the iPhone.

Ted.me Home page on iTouch

Ted’s blog makes for easy reading because the posts are given to your right up front. However, there is no branding images. Also each post doesn’t really pop, there are more posts listed which is a good thing. However, no search feature and no menu of other actions are available on that initial page.

Let’s look deeper

If you click on a post on Ted’s blog it looks pretty well formatted until you get to the images.

Ted.me on iTouch

The images are not automatically formatted to the size of the viewing area. Also looking further at posts on Ted’s blog you don’t automatically see the comments for the post and it looks like other plugins are not supported with whatever Ted is using to make his blog more viewable on the iTouch. I do have to say Ted is considerably ahead of most in his thinking about the user experience on the iPhone. However, if he and everyone else reading this implements WPTouch on their blog their posts are going to look well formatted like those on BenSpark.com.

BenSpark.com on the iTouch

Notice the Branded icon on the top of the screen, a nice bold header and an option to skip to comments. Also take notice that the image is formatted to fit perfectly in the viewing area. If you scroll through and read the post you will get to the bottom where I have a number of plugins also doing their thing. And you see all the comments of users with gravatars and many other great features.

Final Words

If no one can determine which blog is yours just by looking at an icon on their home screen on their iPhone/iPod Touch then they won’t chose your blog to go to to read. If your blog is hard to read on the iPhone/iPod Touch then people won’t go to it and read it. Take a little time and learn about the WPtouch, a valuable plugin and implement it on your blog. Also add the Blog icons plugin to your blog so that you can easily add a favicon or use it as another way to add the iTouch Home screen icon for your blog. When thinking about branding think about all users and their experiences with your blog, if it is easy and quick to load, read and navigate your blog then more people will be apt to read you on all platforms.

How about you?

Are you using WPtouch? Do you see a downside to using it? Have you had good experience using it? Tell me about it!

What can WPtouch do for my blog?

Last night I installed the WordPress Plug-in WPtouch after I watched a very informative video by Chris Pirillo.

I’ve been using my iTouch quite often, I got it from coComment. I noticed that when I load blogs on it I have to expand each one so I can read the content of the posts. This takes time and when I don’t have a lot of it I skip ahead to a faster loading blog. I stumbled upon the video above while looking for ways in which to add a blog icon to my blog so it can show up on the iTouch/iPhone home screen. I wanted to make my blog stand out on the iPhone.

My iTouch Blog Icon
Notice the two blog icons at the bottom of my iTouch home screen. One is for The BenSpark and the other for The Wired Kayaker.

I downloaded and installed WPtouch and added a blog icon for this blog to the proper location. Then I went to my iTouch to see what the blog looked like. Here are some screen shots that show the features of using WPtouch. Basically, what the plug-in does is that it reformats your blog into an iTouch compatible theme. This speeds up load times and improves readability of your posts. This is what it looks like.

The WPtouch Theme

Installing WPtouch on your wordpress blog reformats your blog for speed and readability on the iPhone/iTouch. Here we see

  1. The number of comments on a post and the date of the post
  2. A snapshot of your post, with a large link to push to go directly to the content of that post
  3. Categories and Tags are included for additional navigation
  4. You can quickly load additional entries
  5. Click the “+” sign to add this blog as a bookmark or better yet add it to your home screen

Here are two well known blogs on the iTouch, how easy to read are they?

Shoemoney.com on the iTouch
Shoemoney.com
John Chow on the iTouch
JohnChow.com

Not very, you have to pinch and expand each one just to read a post.

What I am going for is ease of readability and speed of load time. I want readers to instantly recognize my blog and add it to their Home Screen, so I had to give them something that was recognizable for my brand.

Add BenSpark to Home Screen
When you add BenSpark.com to the iPhone/iTouch home screen you get a distinctive and recognizable image that you can click to go directly to the BenSpark Blog.

So now that a reader has added The BenSpark to their iTouch they can click it right from the Home Screen and go right to my blog. Once they are there they can click on any of the latest blog posts or choose to see some older ones. Once they select a blog post they will see a well formatted and easy to read blog post. See what I mean below.

itouch_07

  1. Search box, readers can type in search terms to find posts from you
  2. Post titles can include the date, time,
  3. author and gravatar as well as an option to
  4. skip to the comments section.

Easy reading
With WPtouch your posts are formatted for very easy reading. No need to pinch or expand the screen.

Plug-ins that work with WPtouch

  1. You can still show your affiliate items in the posts.
  2. SezWho plug-in is supported with WPtouch
  3. Sociable plug-in is supported by WPtouch plug in
  4. You can show your categories
  5. You can show your tags
  6. Navigating between posts is easy.

Gravatars

  1. With WPtouch you can easily choose whether or not to show gravatars on your posts
  2. The plug-in Comment Luv is also compatible with the plug-in WPtouch

But what if you want to see the blog as it was created and intended to be seen on a browser. That is easy, you can select that option at the bottom of each screen.

Switching views

I hope that you can now see the importance of making your blog stand out on the iTouch/iPhone. With so many people using both products it would be a waste not to enhance your blog to serve their needs as well, especially when you can use a great plug in like WPtouch. There are many more features to the plug-in itself, you can set colors, decide if gravatars will be seen and even add additional icons for each of your blog pages like the about page and disclosure policy page.

* One caveat is that if you are using WP-Cache you need to configure it. And if you are using WP Super Cache. Currently, it does not work correctly with WPtouch. They’re working on it, though. Visit the WPtouch homepage for updates.