From the days of brows­ing a bare-bones World Wide Web, where an occa­sional graphic was a treat, to our mod­ern fully-interactive, Flash and JavaScript media dri­ven web sites of today, a lot has changed.

To say the least, brows­ing the web has become quite a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. We’ve reached a day where we don’t think twice to pull out our cell­phones to look up a quick piece of infor­ma­tion. “Oh, I’ll just Google that,” or “let me check Wikipedia.” We can do this in the blink of an eye and a fin­ger tap of a screen.

But where does that put us, the col­lege news­pa­pers of today. Many of our papers are just now get­ting online. Oth­ers are just now join­ing the social media craze. But how many of us have mobile ver­sions of our web site?

Gladly, I can say that my col­lege news­pa­per, The Fer­ris State Torch, does. This past year, after get­ting on the Word­Press band­wagon, we have also pushed all of our con­tent to a mobile friendly ver­sion of the site. It auto­mat­i­cally detects what type of phone you’re brows­ing from, and even gives you the option to switch to the full ver­sion of the site. Com­ment­ing, search, cat­e­gories, and even tags are all avail­able and easy to use.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? Wrong. Thanks to Word­Press hav­ing thou­sands of plu­g­ins avail­able, we found one that is truly amaz­ing for mobile pub­lish­ing: WPtouch. After installing and acti­vat­ing the plu­gin, our site was ready for mobile view­ers. The screen­shot above shows a pre­view of our mobile edition.

What other ben­e­fits are there from adding a mobile ver­sion? Mobile doesn’t just mean phone any­more. With the recent rise of the iPod Touch (I see these all over my cam­pus), there is a whole new mar­ket of col­lege stu­dents to tend to. You want to be able to pro­vide them with an easy, and fast, expe­ri­ence of your newspaper’s web site. The eas­ier and faster it is for them, the longer they spend on your site and the more con­tent they read.

How­ever, set­ting up a mobile site isn’t enough. You have to pro­mote it. Show an image on your reg­u­lar web site, some­thing along the lines of “be sure to visit our mobile site”. Heck, you could even put up an image of an iPhone, Pre, Black­berry, to help pro­mote your newly found mobil­ity. Run a house-ad in your print edi­tion. Odds are, a lot of your read­ers aren’t sit­ting in front of a com­puter when they’re read­ing the paper, but I bet they have their cell­phones on them.

With how quickly the web is chang­ing, it’s not a bad idea to keep up with the trends. Who knows, maybe mobile will become the next big thing.

For more info on WPtouch, and how to inte­grate it with your WordPress-based online news­pa­per, visit the WPtouch web site.

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