Used Boats Ahoy!

The site Used Boats Ahoy! is probably my most popular project to date which hasn’t required much major attention in a little while.  The latest features I’ve added were first the Facebook like/share buttons, and then the Google +1 button.

With the current trends of smartphones though, this seems to be changing.  This site was not built with the mobile web in mind (although it’s not usable).  This is a trend that I can no longer ignore, since over the last two years, mobile traffic has been doubling.

UsedBoatsAhoy! is currently built on top of the Joomla CMS framework.  There is an extension called MobileJoomla that promises to make my life easier.  This extension comes in two parts: The component which handles all of the settings, and the plugin which will detect the user agent of the device accessing the website.  Based on the device, the plugin will direct it to the specific site template the the group of similar devices (Apple, Smartphone, and WAP).  My current goal is for speed, so I’ll be sticking to a generic Smartphone template for now.