Mobile is the Future

Posted by Michał ‘mina86’ Nazarewicz on 17th of March 2015

Photo of a smashed mobile phone.
(photo by Cory Doctorow)

A few days ago I received an email from Google Wembaster Tools saying no more no less but: ‘Your webpage sucks on mobile devices!’ Or something. Now that I think of it, I could have been worded slightly differently. The gist was the same though.

I never paid that much attention to how my site looks on phones and tables. I’ve made sure it loaded and looked, but apart from that never spent much time on the issue. I always thought optimising for a small screen would be a lengthy and painful process. How mistaken I was!

In my defence, when I last looked at the problem, state of mobile browsers was different; now there are two things to do. First, add a viewport meta tag, e.g.:

<meta name=viewport
      content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

and then use min-width or max-width CSS media queries. Admittedly the second part may take some time, but if your layout uses simple markup rather than being TABLE-based, reading the excellent article on A List Apart might turn out to be the most time consuming step.

If you haven’t already, do take a look at whether your website looks reasonably well on small screens. Apparently mobile is the future, or some such.

The ‘bad’ news is that I’ve dropped endless scroll feature. This is because in narrow layout the sidebar moves to the bottom and endless scrolling would make it unreachable since it would run away all the time.