This past Sunday I decided to do a little bit of work as I watched some baseball, and I turned my main website into a mobile friendly site using DudaMobile. I was very happy with the ease of the service that DudaMobile.com offers and decided to do a quick review of the website and overall service.
The entire process of setting up my mobile friendly website took about one hour to get fully completed, and could have been done quicker if I knew what I was doing.
I took a test using a Google tool to see how fast my sports betting website loaded on mobile phones and realized that it took 6.8 seconds to load. Ideally you would want it to load in 3 seconds or less on a smartphone. That got me into thinking about making my website mobile friendly again.
I had previously thought about looking into a mobile theme when looking through my analytics and noticing a ton of my traffic is coming from iPhones, Android phones, etc, but I thought it would be too tough to create some kind of mobile re-direct for those visitors.
My site required visitors browsing on a phone to zoom in to read anything, and nothing was really optimized to make any money when visiting through a phone. That was a big problem since my mobile traffic continues to grow, and I think will be huge during the football season when tons of people are on their smart phones during the games.
Anyways I came across DudaMobile, and with nothing else to do on Sunday I decided to give it a try. DudaMobile creates a mobile theme for your website in which mobile visitors are re-directed to. This means that you will still have your normal website when people are visiting from a computer or tablet.
I entered my website URL and DudaMobile instantly turned it into a mobile site, and even suggested a theme that matched my website colors, used my main logo, and even made a good looking mobile friendly footer. Overall right away I was impressed with the looks of things.
It then allowed me to edit different things on the website, which included taking out some text and tables that looked out of place when it got transfered over to a mobile friendly look. All I had to do was select the text or area that I wanted to delete and was able to delete it with a simple click. I did this for all of my main pages, and that only took about 10-15 minutes.
I was then ready to go live and test things out. DudaMobile has an easy to setup WordPress plugin that I installed and activated, and then I was told to set up a redirect. This might be confusing for some webmasters, but after a quick Google search I found exactly where to do this in my C-Panel. Total set up time for this about 15 minutes.
Ta-da the mobile site was now live for anyone coming across my website on their smartphone….
I checked my iPhone and it was live and looking good. Fortunately for me I tried out one of my affiliate links (which use a re-direct) and noticed that they didn’t work. It would have been bad if I didn’t test the link because that is how I make my money with this website. I went back into my backend of the DudaMobile website and quickly found out the solution. I just needed to click the “don’t mobilize this link” box for each affiliate re-direct link I have. Got that fixed up in about 15 minutes and my mobile website was basically complete.
I was extremely impressed by the ease of everything to do with DudaMobile. I figured it would take me a number of hours to get TheSportsGeek.com switched over to a mobile friendly theme and thought I may even have to hire someone to do it all for me since I’m not to smart with the tech side of websites. I was wrong, and I did it all myself with no help whatsoever in about an hour.
Overall I rate DudaMobile 10/10 until I come across any problem… which I don’t see happening anytime soon.
Click Here to visit their website and Mobilize your website….
My name is Kevin. I am a college dropout turned full time internet marketer. Ignore the site name for now - I make a very comfortable living online but am no where near what I think of as "rich". Follow my progress and enjoy my internet marketing tips and ramblings.
Kate Lyon July 24, 2012 at 2:49 pm
My experience was not similar…sure set-up goes okay…but what about if you make a change to your desktop website…the sync does not work well at all. On-line chat support is slowwww. So you can’t get answers to your questions. This solution MAY only work for an organization that NEVER updates or changes their website…really! Not the best solution in my book.
Kevin July 24, 2012 at 3:02 pm
I’ve never tried making changes on my website to see how the sync is. Thanks for pointing out some “cons” with DudaMobile.
I wouldn’t go as far to say that it only works for an organization that never updates their website, as you can easily log into DudaMobile and make the changes there too if it doesn’t sync properly. Although if you make a ton of changes regularly it wouldn’t be efficient.
Adam July 26, 2012 at 8:09 am
I agree with Kate.
I’ve been using Duda Mobile for a while not, and while it’s extremely quick to prop up a mobilised version of your website or blog, it’s pretty frustrating making syndicated changes to your website.
If you do major things like add/remove new menu pages, change banners, try to add banners to the mobile site etc then it can get pretty frustrating. Basically the entire advanced editor tool is hard to use and takes time to get used to.
Support is OK in my opinion. Takes a couple of days to get a response. They didn’t have live support when I used them.
All of this being said, it’s still a fantastic product and very cheap at just $9/month. I’m assuming most sites won’t ever have to use the advanced editor too anyway.
Matt July 27, 2012 at 12:46 am
Although this wouldn’t work for your site Kevin, a cheaper alternative with virtually no setup would be to buy a responsive WP theme. The prices on average are no different than standard WP themes and you don’t have to worry about extra (sub)domains, plugins or extra software to go mobile.
I say it wouldn’t work for your site, but depending on how easy this is for you long term, having your site coded into a responsive theme might be worthwhile.
Gloria Grove October 9, 2012 at 5:45 pm
I am an inexperience web designer, if I even dare use the word. Dudamobile was pretty easy to set up but I did not realize it was not good for sites with a lot of pages (I have 500+). It times out before uploading changes and gives me an error message. Sometimes when I go back in later it actually has saved the changes but I never know.
I found their online support to be excellent, they even took the time to do a screenshot of my mobile site and offer suggestions but I am not sure it will be worth the effort. I will have to put 500+ urls in if I want my entire site mobile.
So although I like the looks of it right now I am not sure where to go from here since I add quite a few pages each week. I use Intuit websites design which is about as basic as you can get.
Charles December 10, 2012 at 11:45 am
If you have more than a 1 or 2 page website you will probably regret doing business with Duda Mobile! I paid for their “Upgraded Service” and am regretting it.
I have been emailing back and forth with them for nearly a month trying to fix issues with their site software. Finally got tired and called their support line. I was on hold for nearly 30 minutes only to have the Duda rep come on the phone, say “I cant hear you” and hang up on me before I could get a word in…….. Buyer beware, their system does not work and their support stinks!
Most of the links in my website do not work. Their system would not save some of the changes or would save them incorrectly. Their support stinks. The software altered or just flat erased many of my links to pages with-in my site.
The software does not work……..just saying!
Kevin December 10, 2012 at 7:27 pm
That’s interesting Charles. I still haven’t had any problems. What theme are you using? Maybe some themes are less compatible?
Sarah February 28, 2013 at 11:16 am
I have had similar issues. I am totally regretting purchasing the upgraded plan. Their classic and new site builders are ruining the look of my mobile site. As a small business owner I don’t have time to sit for hours trying to make their software work right. I’m very dissatisfied.
when I add a link and turn it into a button, sometimes it puts a duplicate button in the footer for no good reason. when I publish the published site does NOT look the way it does on the site builder screen.
duda mobile= FAIL.
Ira Simon January 21, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Dudamobile has been worse than useless getting my mobile site functional. Months have passed with no response. Look elsewhere. This service is not hard to find online. I am currently looking into these and like what I see.
Kevin February 2, 2013 at 5:17 pm
They’ve still been great for my site, I guess it depends on what kind of site you have. Are you using wordpress?
Jim February 19, 2013 at 1:46 pm
We re piloting a mobile site from our current full up CoH 311 website. It took an hour or so to get used to the advanced editor, but the results we really fantastic. No issues here so far, and their chat support was within minutes. No complaints and we will be hosting Houston 311 with dudamobile.