It’s no secret to many readers that I love mobile website technology. I’ve had the opportunity to review various site building programs and learn how they work. By far, my favorite program is GoMobi, partly due to the cost and the flexibility. GoMobi is a proprietary CMS (Content Management System) that is easy to use and will give you professional results with little effort.
Each version of the interface has improved upon previous generations and this one is no exception. We’re going to look at a few of those updates in this article.
WYSIWYG Editor
The first new feature is the WSIWYG text editor that offers you a wide variety of options from within GoMobi. You’ll see it in several areas, such as Design, Coupons, Add a Page and About Products.
This is the WYSISYG editor in its compressed form for working within the GoMobi Site Builder but there’s an option to expand the working area to make is easier to write code.
Here’s the expanded view of the editor which fills the entire Site Builder workspace.
In addition to the expanded view, there are many more controls. These are:
- Insert PayPal
- Insert Adfonic Ad
- Insert Google Adsense
- Insert Mojiva
- Insert Smaato
- Insert Youtube
- Insert Vimeo
- Insert Facebook Like
- Insert Facebook Comments
Previous to this version I would have recommended writing all code in an HTML editor (like Adobe Dreamweaver), then importing that into GoMobi. I still recommend that for long lines of code because if the Site Builder crashes you run the risk of losing your work. Still the editor works for editing code on the fly.
Site Navigation
In previous versions, all items were added to the site navigation and were marked by an icon, but with some layouts you won’t want an icon on the homepage.
Now, with the various features, you have the option of adding that to the homepage and/or the navigation menu bar. If you uncheck Display on homepage, a page URL will appear.
Find Us Feature
If you have more than one location added with this feature a “Show Nearest Location” button will appear under the Find Us heading. This can be turned off, as well.
The size of the maps has been increased and when setting up this feature you have a couple of options. One is to use the Verify Map Placement option for precisely placing your location on the map, the other is to add additional information, such as: “around the corner from the post office.”
Logo
In previous versions, you had the option of loading a logo that would be the header on all your pages.
Now, a new option allows you display a carousel of up to six images. Note that you can enable the check box at the bottom to show only on the home page. There’s also an advanced section where you can add arrows to the carousel and automatically play it.
Further down this page is one last option, which allows you to upload a 114×114 pixel icon. You have the option to prompt users to add their site to their home page. Note that this will only work on the iPhone and iPad.
Site Footer
Another important change is the Site Footer. In previous versions you could turn off the GoMobi branding to create white label mobile sites but that’s all the control that you had. If you used my workaround you could remove the header and footer at will on your custom pages but not on the main site layout.
In this version you have a lot more control over how the footer is displayed. Note that to control the address and phone number you must add both the Call Us and Find Us features to your mobile site.
Drag and Drop
This is a new feature which will be added in sections. Here’s how it works in this release. As an example, let’s say you have an image gallery and you want to change the order of the images. Prior to this release you would have to delete items then add them again in the order that you want them to appear. Now, you can simply drag and drop to reposition the item. The following features now support drag and drop:
- Image Gallery
- Shopping Cart
- Forms
- Find Us
- Video Feature
- Coupons Feature
Images
With images you can upload them manually or link to several galleries. If you use this approach, use an image editor to resize your images first for both tablets and smart phones. If not, your images will take a long time to upload.
As for the galleries that you can use, these are: Flickr, Piccasso and http://photobucket.com/.
Conclusion
GoMobi is by far my favorite CMS (Content Management System) for building mobile sites. It’s one down side is the proprietary feature of the software, but aside from that, it offers a lot of options for mobile sites that are quick and easy to build. You can test it out through many providers, such as HostPapa, HostGator or OpenSRS.
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