User blog:Hotsoup.6891/Mobile Forward 2015



Happy New Year, Wikians! Over the course of 2014, we saw a huge increase in the amount of people accessing Wikia communities through mobile devices. It was such a big increase, in fact, that this year we expect that approximately 50% of all traffic  will come from mobile devices!

With that in mind, we will be making mobile one of our main focuses of 2015. We'll be working on projects aimed at growing awareness about how important mobile is on Wikia, helping you create your content in a mobile-friendly way, improving the mobile experience, adding new apps and mobile features, and improving the visibility and support that you receive for mobile products.

Mobile Help Center
With mobile being a big focus in 2015, where can you go for information and help about Wikia Mobile?

For starters, we have expanded our help resources to include a section dedicated entirely to mobile support. We call it the Mobile Help Center. This mobile-focused Help Center will assist administrators and users alike in learning about Wikia Mobile. The help center is split into two subtopics: Mobile Best Practices and Mobile Products.

Mobile Best Practices
We will have an ongoing section in the Mobile Help Center about mobile best practices. This section will provide tips for how to create your content in a mobile-friendly way, as well as what types of content are not mobile-friendly.

So far, we have four articles on best practices for new and existing users:
 * Intro to mobile - A beginner's guide to mobile on Wikia.
 * Best Practice: Wikitext - A general guide to wikitext with mobile in mind.
 * Best Practice: Main pages - The front door of your community. Is it mobile-friendly?
 * Best Practice: Avoiding nested tables - Table inception. Aka, tables inside of tables inside of tables. This is the first in a series of case studies we are running on the biggest obstacles to a great mobile experience.

Mobile Products
Mobile Products will educate users on the ins and outs of all of our mobile products, and provide links for downloading our apps onto your mobile devices. Here you will find descriptions and user guides for our apps, as well as links to the apps on the Android and Apple stores.

So far, there are 28 official Wikia apps, ranging from an app that shows you the lyrics to your favorite songs, to an app that gives you game stats and info for Shadow of Mordor while you are playing it, and an ever-growing number of Community Apps specially tailored to specific communities.

Community Apps

 * Help page: Help:Community Apps

Community Apps are free Apps available for Android and iPhone. They provide quick mobile access to your wikia's content that is curated by you! Community Apps allow your community to have an optimal display and format for mobile devices, so your wikia is easy to read, navigate and explore.

Find them on: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Wikia,+Inc. Android] • iOS

Download Community Apps here

Game Guides

 * Help page: Help:Game Guides

Game Guides is a free App available for Android and iPhone. It provides quick mobile access to your wikia's content that is curated by you! Game Guides will show the content of all communities in the gaming vertical that have curated content on their full site.

Get it on: Android • iOS

Lyrically

 * Help page: Help:Lyrically Lyrics App

Lyrically is a free smartphone app available for iOS and Android. It provides quick access to every song in LyricWikia's community-powered database of over 1.5 million songs. You can search for lyrics and automatically find the lyrics for the song currently playing in your device's music player.

Get it on: Android • iOS

Palantir

 * Help page: Help:Palantir

Palantir is powered by the official Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor wikia, and will provide gamers with continuously updated information and accurate guides and walkthroughs. The app will also track your in-game statistics, location the maps, completed quests and many more facets tailored to your game save.

Get it on: iOS (iPad only)

My Wikia

 * Help page: Help:MyWikia

My Wikia is your streamlined, personalized view of Wikia right in your hand. The app is available for the iPad and it provides you with the best Wikia reading experience you can imagine.

Get it on: iOS (iPad only)

News and Feedback

 * Technical Updates - Our apps are frequently updated in order to add new features and address bugs that are an inevitability in any software product. These version updates indicate that our apps will constantly keep improving. You can get an idea of what changes are being made to our apps by following the Wikia Technical Updates blog.
 * User Feedback - Along with the data we see about how apps are being used, your feedback is our main way of knowing what people think about our apps. Through user feedback, we have received a number of suggestions about how to enhance the mobile experience. Each suggestion is considered by our mobile team, who decides whether to implement the suggestions. While we can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented in our apps, we can promise that we will consider all of your feedback and do our best to fit our apps to your needs.

If you ever want to send feedback but you're not sure how, check out Mobile Help Central. All of our app help pages have instructions for how to send feedback about a particular app.

Contact Us
As always, you can send us comments, questions, and suggestions to Special:Contact. If it is mobile-related, please put "Mobile" in the title and, if possible, specify which app you are providing feedback for.