Yeah, so I logged onto the old Google console which is where you go to look at stats on your site and how well it's doing for the all important search engine optimization (SEO), that I couldn't give a shit about. And yeah, it was telling me that I wasn't responsive ... as if I've never heard that before ... as if I didn't know that.
Well, even though I couldn't give a shit about Google rankings because I'm not looking to sell anything on this site - you either find it and like it, or you don't. Matters little to me. But the whole responsiveness thing relates to the user experience of your site and is heavily weighted to retards. I'm sorry, we're not allowed to use that term anymore, the correct term is “iPhone users”. The Google algorithm uses mobile, particularly the iPhone as the benchmark for a site's experience these days.
Well, my site pre-dates the iPhone. Only by a few months, but it was built in an era of desktop browsing. I've updated it several times, but it's been many years since I've looked at the user interface (UI). I will be honest, the last time I updated it, I did look at Apple's site because, well, even though there tech is limiting, they know how to make something look good. Credit where credit's due. At the time, pretty much everyone was doing fixed width pages. Mine have been set to 1,000 pixels (pretty much keeping it just under the 1024 pixel margin that many monitors had at the time). What this enabled you to do was create a fixed base that a browser wouldn't mess (too much) with. You could then position things as you wanted within that fixed base. Accounting for any nuances the plethora of browsers that were around at the time had.
This works and it does work on a mobile device. The problem is that it is wider than most phone screens including that amazing bit of kit, the iPhone, which means that you have to move around a lot to see the content. Additionally, because it's fixed width and the fonts are fixed heights, they're consider small for a mobile device. I have to be honest, I don't disagree with any of this.
What many companies started to do was build parallel sites, so you would have your main website and then a mobile site. I did look into this a few years back and it just didn't make sense to maintain two sites. There are also multiple other problems with this that places like supermarkets ran into where you get different discounts on the mobile site than on the desktop site because the content isn't synced.
The brilliant thing about doing absolutely nothing about this when I last looked at it is that the world has moved on again (as it tends to do). Now, you can build a responsive site that essentially looks at the screen size and then adjusts the content to fit. That means one site, all devices. There are many ways to do this and it would be relatively nasty to get right for complex designs, however, the other brilliant thing about waiting is that folks have made the tools available to plug in and do all the sizing stuff for you. A huge shout out to
Bootstrap for making their code available.
So, I'm slowly going through every page on the site again to make it responsive using Bootstrap. The good thing about this change, rather than the move from WAMP to LEMP, is that I can do it page by page as opposed to one big move. You'll slowly see pages change over the coming weeks as we take on a new responsive look.
