Hi, I run Lookahead Consulting in Seattle. Follow me @reifman or email me.

Building Mobile & Tablet Apps

Most people can get by with a responsive WordPress theme that makes their site easily readable on a smartphone. However, if you wish to offer a smartphone app for your site, there are WordPress plugins that make the process easier. This guide describes five of them, with top marks to AppPresser.

If you wish to build a custom iPhone or Android application for your WordPress site, you should plan on a budget of at least $10,000 for custom design, development and maintenance, at a minimum. One of the nice things about dedicated mobile apps is that they can fully integrate with the features of your phone such as GPS location and notifications.

There are also development platforms that make it easier to build custom smartphone applications to run on multiple platforms e.g. PhoneGap or Appcelerator. Building mobile apps is beyond the scope of this tutorial. AppArchitect claims to make building apps easy for anyone but you’ll likely want to hire a qualified technical team to help you with this.

Please feel free to ask questions or post comments to this guide below. You can also reach me on Twitter @reifman or email me directly.

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