User blog:Dopp/Updates to Wikia Mobile

If you have an iPhone or Android mobile device, you may have noticed that the mobile version of Wikia has been getting a lot more attractive and interesting lately. Since we released our new mobile site back in December, we’ve been rolling out improvements to it nearly every week! Our mobile traffic has doubled in the last year (with some wikis getting nearly 20% of their traffic from mobile devices), and we’re working hard to keep up with that growth! Here are some of the changes you might have noticed since our last update.

New Features
Wiki Nav. Our mobile skin now includes your wiki’s full navigation menus at the top, accessible via the navigation icon. Since we currently have two styles of navigation in use across Wikia (the original two-level nav and the expanded three-level navigation), the mobile navigation is compatible with both. We’ve also kept the “Random Page” button available to visitors by placing it at the top of the menu.

Sharing. By clicking the sharing icon, you can now open a quick list of mobile-friendly ways to share a page with your friends through Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, or email.

Category Pages. We’ve also redesigned the Category pages. The alphabetical list is now collapsed into sections by letter (with an “expand all” link if you prefer to view everything). If you have Category Exhibition enabled, we’ll also display attractive thumbnails to represent the pages.

Read More. At the bottom of every page, you can see links to the same related pages you do on the desktop version. This is a useful invitation to readers to keep them interested and clicking further into your wiki.

Log In & Commenting. You can now log in to our new mobile interface to leave comments on blog posts, and wherever article comments are enabled. At the moment, this is all you can do while logged in through the mobile skin, but it lays the groundwork for more contribution tools that we look forward to releasing in the future.

Wikia.com & Hubs. We recently redesigned our homepage and hubs, and they look great on mobile now, too!

Friendlier ads. Ads now have a “close” button that you can click to remove them from view for each page load.

It’s faster! We ran some tests and found that a wiki page now loads about 20 - 50% faster on mobile than on the desktop version. We’re continually working to optimize load time to stay accessible at slower phone connection speeds.

Just the Beginning
Our mobile site is an exciting development project, and we have lots of ideas and plans ahead of us. You can expect to keep seeing regular improvements, and we’ll tell you about them in our Technical Updates as soon as they’re ready for you to enjoy.

What you can do to help? Start checking your wiki on a mobile device more frequently, and try to arrange your content in a way that can looks good in small spaces. If any of your standard pages look weird on a mobile device, please send us specific examples so we can check them out for ourselves. You can reach us through Special:Contact or leave feedback right from your phone via the “Feedback” link at the bottom of every page.

And don’t forget -- you can view wikis on your iPhone or Android device from wherever you are, so enjoy your favorite wikis while you’re on the go!