Mobile Website (dudamobile.com)

OMG.  Five Lakes Studio is a mobile casual game company, but we had no mobile website.  What's even worse is a majority of our traffic is coming from mobile devices (surprise!!!):

How did we get here?

We don't get much traffic to our website, and we don't want to spend a lot of time on it.  We focus our business on our users and our apps.  For example, we just integrated AppsFire's AppBooster SDK into Picross HD so users can contact us and we can communicate with them directly within the App.  I plan on writing a blog post just about it.  So far the results are looking promising.  However, you have to have a website.

While we could hand code HTML, we ended up using iWeb.  Our pages are mostly static, and we wanted something that was fast to create and gives us creative control (not ridged templates).  When we first launched Euchre HD we had some user complaints because they didn't understand how to setup Game Center.  I was able to quickly (minutes) create and post visual step by step instructions on how to do this by using iWeb and Snagit.    

The downside with iWeb is it doesn't help with the creation of a mobile website, and the HTML produced isn't well suited for mobile.  Also, I'm not sure what the future of iWeb is going to be.  I think it is an amazing tool and I wish Apple was doing more with it.

What are we to do?

I started searching for a mobile website creation tool.  I ended up finding an interesting online/hosted solution from dudamobile.com.  They have an ad supported model and a paid model  ($9.00/month).  The paid model also supports connecting to your domain so now we have m.fivelakesstudio.com.

Getting Started

Its very easy to get started.   Dudamobile walks you through setting up a new site.  You can pick from several themes.  The nice thing is you aren't locked into a theme.  During editing you can customize the page headers, footers, background, colors, layout, and so much more.

You can interact directly with a preview of a page and choose from many highly customizable interesting drag and drop widgets:

My favorite widget is the Image Slider.  You can add up to 3 images in a slider style control.  You can see it above in the preview (currently showing Kento).  

Page Import and Syncing

One of the nice things about dudamobile is that it can import and sync to your existing website.  When you add a page, you can give it the URL to one of your existing pages.  It will then important the page. I was surprised this even worked for iWeb sites.  I did have to do some basic cleanup and reformatting on the imported content.  It was mostly deleting extra stuff I didn't want in the mobile site.

I haven't tried syncing content.  Most of the content we have is fairly static so I turned it off.  Plus I am doubtful syncing will work well with iWeb, but I might be surprised again.

Support

I was impressed with the dudamobile support staff.  I had some issues getting the slider to work the way I wanted.  They where very responsive and helpful.

Conclusion

It has only been live for about a week and so far I am pleased with how this turned out.   I still need to setup redirects on all the web pages to redirect to the mobile website.  Currently, only the main page has a redirect.

Please feel free to follow me on twitter at @fivelakesstudio.  I would love to hear how others have solved their mobile website needs.

I hope this was useful.  Please visit our site and try out our games for iOS.