Mobile applications are growing in popularity and it is becoming increasingly important now that you tailor your web portal to be supported in mobile environments. Fortunately Joomla! CMS has several extensions and template configurations that will offer this capability.

Start with a smart template:

Using a third party template vender for your design foundation can save you a ton of time and money when implementing a mobile strategy for your site.  Rocket Theme or YooTheme templates for are a good example of template venders that have built in features for presenting your portal on mobile devices. You are allowed in these templates to configure primary menus for a mobile user which allows you to segment content just for your mobile user. This is often a good idea if you have a portal that leverages a lot of 3^rd party components since not all components will display as well as others in a mobile browser. There is also a great component/template extension called “MobileJoomla” which is simple to install and works pretty much right out of the box. It is very important to test and view your portal on the targeted mobile devices so you can see what your users are seeing and adjust where required to create an optimized mobile user experience.

Do Not use Flash:

I sooo love flash interactive for some of the cool things you can do with it but unfortunately this does not work on iphones of ipads and many other mobile devices so you need to not direct users to any pages with flash content.

Smartphone Applications:

Sometimes you may want or need to have an actual application available for your portal to take advantage of unique features. For example if you are using JomSocial for a site with a social network you may want to consider getting an branded application for your portal from the folks at iJoomer.com. What I have noticed is that the JomSocial pages do not display well in a normal browser experience on most smart phones. However with an iJoomer application branded to your portal smart phone users can download from their phone and access these features in very nice mobile layout.

Overall there some good tools available now and surely more will evolve over time so make sure you think through your user experience for mobile users when designing your Joomla portal.

CNP Integrations builds and customizes portals for mobile and can help you with this. Feel free to call for a free consultation on your next Mobile Joomla! CMS portal project. 1-508-644-1553