X-Cart Mobile
While the
original iPhone was announced in 2007 with "desktop-class web browsing" allowing you to "see any web page the way it was designed to be seen," once people got a taste for mobile-optimized sites many now expect or even demand them. Google now uses "
mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal" making this even more of a requirement than a preference.
Can X-Cart be made mobile-friendly?
Yes! And you even have more than one option.
1. Adapt your existing site to be
responsive.
It can take some time to make your site more mobile-friendly depending on the degree of customizations that are desired or other changes needed. Here are the pros and cons:
- Pro: Responsive
- Pro: Maintains custom look and function of your site.
- Pro: Future customizations still work with no/little tweaking for mobile.
- Con: Longer to do this initial setup.
2. Get a mobile module like one of these:
Here are the pros and cons:
- Pro: A bolt-on simple solution.
- Con: Customizations may also need to be adapted to the mobile module.
- Con/Pro: It won't look like your main site, but like a standard mobile application. Some people prefer this.
3. Change to a responsive skin.
If you're ready for a new look and a fresh start, consider using a responsive skin as your starting point. X-Cart includes two responsive skins which can make great foundations for additional style changes. X-Cart also has a collection of design templates which are already responsive or can be by X-Cart. A great third-party responsive template is Reboot (and now Ultra). Here are the pros and cons:
- Pro: Responsive.
- Pro: A bolt-on simple solution.
- Pro: Future customizations still work with no/little tweaking for mobile.
- Con: Some assembly required: you'll want to adapt your logo and maybe some color and other tweaks to your liking.
- Con: Any customizations to the look of the site or other add-ons will need to be re-implemented in the new skin.
This is a great time to upgrade to the latest version of X-Cart which we can help with.
Each solution has its benefits and each will satisfy
Google's mobile-friendly requirements. We're partial to the first option: adapt your beautiful custom skin to be responsive.
What about tablets and iPads?
While phones have smaller screens, iPads have big beautiful screens which really show off your website as it was originally intended. We usually reserve the mobile-friendly concerns for the smaller devices and let tablets display the site normally. We often still make a few tweaks to improve the display of some elements or adapt as requested.
Contact Us about making your X-Cart mobile!
These suggestions are for
X-Cart v4 (Classic) which is the best version of X-Cart and still actively supported. If you are using a different version of X-Cart you should already have a responsive site.
