GEO Disco is a club located in Mendoza Argentina. They have their website designed and built with Your Web Department, and they regularly update its content – especially the blog – by themselves. The website is quite popular, with thousands of regular visitors, and a big reason for that is the fact they keep their content fresh.

A sizable portion of their traffic comes from mobile users, so it was critical for them to be able to display their content in a mobile-optimized way, while at the same time retaining the basic look and feel of the computer/regular website. Also very important for them was to use the same www.geodiscoclub.com domain for both computer and mobile devices. Finally, since like all Your Web Department clients they manage the website on their own, so they didn’t want to have maintain two separate versions of it.

Creating the mobile-optimized version

YWD lets you create a mobile-optimized version of your website in a few minutes and without any programming. All you need to do is click the Design button in the YWD back-end to launch YWD Designer, and under Mobile settings choose Use mobile-optimized version. This will instruct YWD to use a different layout for your website when it's viewed on mobile so it looks great there (as opposed to a tiny version of the website in which people ave to constantly zoom in/out with their fingers).

YWD uses responsive design techniques that will make your text very legible and provides you a myriad of other design options specifically for the mobile-optimized version of your website. You can even choose to simulate a mobile phone while creating the mobile version in the YWD back-end, which it gives you a good idea of how people are going to see it on their phones.

Next, you’ll probably want to upload a separate version of your page banner. It should be 320 pixels wide – and typically you don’t want it to be taller than 80-90 pixels – to fit within the mobile’s small viewport when viewed in landscape format (if people tilt their phone, the banner will automatically adjust its width).

You can also hide/show certain layout elements from the mobile version – the right column, for instance. YWD’s default choices for that are adequate in most cases, but you can toggle them as needed. Publish your settings and you’re done in terms of design. Onviously you can launch YWD Designer again and tweak your settings as much as you want.

 
Tailoring the content to different platforms

YWD lets you choose which content should be displayed on computers and/or mobile. For instance, for the computer version of their Home page, GEO Disco chose to include a Facebook ‘Like’ Box. On the mobile, however, they preferred not to display it, as it simply wouldn’t fit in there. So all they did was edit that content block and select Computers/tablets only from a dropdown. The YWD back-end then indicates that content block will only be shown those devices but not on mobile.

They also had a couple of pages that they didn’t want to include on the mobile version. Again, quite simple. It’s just a matter of toggling that option in the page properties.

 
The result

The computer/tablet version of their website is quite flashy and includes a Facebook ‘Like’ box, a right column with Google Ads, a social media sidebar, etc.

The mobile version has the same blog (YWD automatically resizes the images on the fly so they fit within the mobile viewport, tucks the posts’ timestamps and author names under the headings, etc.) but with only the essential elements. Type is big and legible, and only the absolutely necessary content is displayed.

If you’d like to have more information on how to get a mobile version of your website or blog, please check out this page on the YWD main website. Your Web Department can create the mobile version of your website for you, or you can do it yourself (it doesn't get much more complicated than what I described above).

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