The Covered Bridge Cellars Blog

A New Look For Our Blog

We decided to try out a new design for the blog that better incorporates our logo color and font. Part of this change stems from the ongoing development of our website and the clean, minimalist design that has emerged after lots of brainstorming and refinement of ideas. One thing we have been thinking about is whether or not to integrate the blog into the website, or, keep it separate. It's already setup as a subdomain of coveredbridgecellars.com, which, for SEO purposes means it's viewed as a separate site by Google. But since the content is about our business we are leaning toward integrating it into our site, which means this design could change again--albeit slightly. One issues that poses a few challenges is that our main website is going to be a one-column layout with horizontal navigation, while the blog is two columns. Either way there a few different ways we can proceed with this. We're still thinking things through and will keep playing with the pieces of the puzzle until the right model emerges. So what do you think of the design? Do we integrate, or, keep it separate?

Jeremy

How to Create a Mobile Version of Your Winery Blog with MoFuse

 

Recently I found out about a great free service called Mofuse that auto converts your blog or website for viewing on any mobile device. There are several services like this out there, but this one is simply the best. To get a feel for what I'm talking about click on either of these links to see how our blog would be rendered on a regular cell phone, or, on an iPhone:

Regular Mobile Phone

blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi

iPhone

blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi/iphone

The Mofuse service is free, but if you want to use your own domain (Pro account) there is a $3/month fee. Below is step by step guide to how I setup our blog with this service:

1. First, I went to godaddy and registered coveredbridgecellars.mobi as a new domain name. You don't have to use your own domain since Mofuse will give you your own address when you sign up. For example, if you click on thecbcblog.mofuse.mobi or thecbcblog.mofuse.mobi/iphone you will go to the same pages that are linked above. And of course if you use any of these addresses on your cell phone you will get the mobile version of your site.

2. To use your own domain simply sign-up for a pro account and enter the domain you want to use in the setup page of your Mofuse account, myblogname.mobi for example. I took the added step of creating a sub-domain (by creating a CNAME entry for my newly purchased domain) called blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi, which will point to the default domain from step 1 above, thecbcblog.mofuse.mobi. Get all that? If you want to skip using your own domain simply register for a free account and provide the name of your blog along with the site ID you want to use, for example, myawesomeblog.mofuse.mobi, or something like that and you will be good to go.

3. Next, you have to input your feed URL so that Mofuse can pull your content and reformat it. I entered in feeds.coveredbridgecellars.com/thecbcblog and was verified in about 3 seconds.

4.That is pretty much it, the last step in this process is to hit the launch button at the end of the Mofuse setup process. In about 5 seconds your site is now fully viewable on any mobile device.

5. Mofuse allows you to add links, photo's, and all kinds of content to your "mobile" formatted site all from your Mofuse account.There are a lot of bells and whistles and I have yet to explore everything, but like I said, this service is the best thing out there. All in, it takes less than a minute to setup a free account and be up and running. But wait, there is more! What about the iPhone you ask?

iPhone Setup

There are regular cell phones and then there is the iPhone. Mofuse will format your site for regular phones and also has a special feature to format your site specifically for the iPhone. The cool thing is that you don't have to do anything except turn this feature on in your Mofuse account. There is even an option for uploading a custom Webclip which will be used to create your very own iPhone icon when someone adds your bookmarked site to the iPhone Home Screen. Below is a screen capture of my iPhone with our logo as a button in the lower left hand corner. When I press it, up comes our "mobile" blog in the safari browser!

 

Again, iPhone users should use the blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi/iphone URL to access your site and everyone else can simply use blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi.

Have fun!

*2nd EDIT* MoFuse is now totally free for users. There are no more monthly fees for the advanced services.

*EDIT* After exchanging emails with David Berube, the founder of Mobile Fusion, I found out that there is no need to use a different URL to access our mobile formatted blog if you are on an iPhone. The blog.coveredbridgecellars.mobi address is all you need since Mofuse will auto-detect and re-direct iPhone users to the appropriate page.

Jeremy