Mobile Templates Available For Blogger

, Mobile View

Although our Blogger sites can be viewed on most mobile devices, it can be difficult to effectively read blogspot sites due to the small screen size.

To enhance our readers experience of Blogger blogs when viewed on Smartphones (and similar devices), the Blogger Team have enabled Mobile Templates as an opt-in setting through Blogger in Draft.

Mobile Templates reformat the appearance of our blogs to include:

• Blog Title
• Recent posts with thumbnails and a preview snippet (which are linked to their item pages)
• Links to read the standard version of the site
• Mobile Ads (where the blog owner has chosen to display Ads beneath posts or in the sidebar)
• Comments (including avatars), scaled images and videos

If you have chosen to use Blogger Pages and have added a Page List gadget to your template, this will be shown in the position it appears in your site.

Which templates are supported?

At present, six variants each of the Simple and Awesome templates are available as Mobile Templates. If you're using one of these Blogger Template Designer templates, the mobile version of your site will appear styled in the same manner as when viewed on your desktop.

If you use a different, third party or customized template, the mobile version of your website will adopt the Simple template appearance.

I'm pretty sure we'll be able to customize the appearance of our Mobile Templates by adding custom CSS, which I'll write about in a future post once I've experimented a little.

How to enable Mobile Templates for your blog

Currently Mobile Templates are an experimental feature available through Blogger in Draft to which we must opt-in.

Log in to your Blogger dashboard via Blogger in Draft, then go to Settings>Email and Mobile.

Near the top of this page you'll see the new option available to enable mobile templates for your site, along with a preview link and QR code (so you can preview on your own mobile device):

Check Yes to enable Mobile Templates, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save. 

Once you've saved this setting, anyone who visits your website using a mobile device will be automatically redirected to the mobile version of your website.

What do you think

Do you like the new Mobile templates, and have you enabled them for your own Blogger site?

Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions below.