No kidding. This takes absolutely no skill whatsoever, and within fifteen minutes of reading this article, you can have a really cool mobile phone mortgage / real estate / whatever website.
Okay. Here we go.
Step one. Decide where you want your mobile site to be on the World Wide Web.
You can do it a few different ways. I'm going to cover the two best ways right now.
1. Get a mobile phone domain name for your mobile website, like CaliforniaMortgage.mobi for example. It is generally accepted that .mobi domain names are given preference by search engines when somebody searches for your site using a mobile phone.
You can get .MOBI Domains from GoDaddy.com for only $7.
You really should read more about it here. And if it still doesn't make sense to you, than just don't do it.
You won't hurt my feelings- I promise.
I would only want you to do this if you believe that this whole cell phone nonsense is going to catch on. Only do this if you think that people are going to be using cell phones to browse the web, in increasing numbers, as time goes by.
If you choose not to register your own .mobi domain, there is another option.
2. You can set up your mobile site on the domain you have right now. This doesn't cost you anything.
You save the $7 and you can get going right away. Like, as soon as you are done reading this blog post.
You just need to contact your hosting provider and ask them how to set-up a subdomain on your hosting account. However, if you just log into your hosting account, you should be able to set up a subdomain yourself, very easily.
A subdomain looks like this: http://myMobileSite.myDomainName.com
The "subdomain" in the above example would be "myMobileSite".
Whatever you choose to call your "subdomain," your new URL will be http://subdomain.domain.com
It's very simple and it should always be 100% free. If your host tells you differently, get another hosting company! They might have a limit to how many subdomains you can have, but you should be able to have at least 3 at no charge.
If you use GoDaddy for hosting, they have an article about setting up a subdomain right here.
So now you have a place on the web for your mobile site. What next?
Whether you just added a subdomain to your current hosting account, or you just set up new hosting on a .mobi domain name, you need to upload content.
You can download free mobile website templates all over the web. Just Google it.
Or check out this site: http://onbile.com
They supposedly allow you to build a really nice mobile site for free.
There are a few "free mobile site builders" on the web. I don't know what the catch is. Maybe no catch.
But I prefer to do it another way.
I recommend that you do this:
Install Wordpress on your new .mobi domain or your free subdomain.
Again, just like setting up the subdomain, your hosting company should provide a way of installing Wordpress onto your domain or subdomain at no charge and automatically. You should have an option to install Wordpress from your hosting control panel, if you are using a half-way decent hosting company.
If not, you'll have to install Wordpress yourself, but it's not that complex. Wordpress is known for it's "famous five-minute install."
Once your hosting company installs Wordpress, you'll log into your new Wordpress site.
Again, this is no more difficult than using ActiveRain. Wordpress is a blog, just like ActiveRain.
Once logged into your FREE Wordpress blog, go to the "Themes" section and click "Add New."
Search for "mobile" under Wordpress themes.
Pick a free mobile theme and upload it.
Add content. Blogs. Pages. Whatever you want. Very, very easy.
That's it. This whole thing should take you less than an hour and you can have a new mobile website up and running from anywhere to $0 - $5 per month.
Read more about some free mobile Wordpress themes here.
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