How do I get my current website looking decent on a mobile phone?

Andy From Sligo · 23-07-2017 10:57pm #1

hello, I have produced my (very basic) website for my business. I do not claim it to be anything special but it really does for my needs .. on a computer that is (running Chrom or Firefox) - but when i try loading it onto my samsung Note3 (using Chrome browser app) it looks very bad.

Is there something I could do like submit/upload my desktop website to somewhere (automated, ie not done by a person) and it could optimise it for mobile phones? - does such even exist? - been googling but havent found anything yet.

M.T.D · 24-07-2017 8:01am

Try responsinator.com/ in your desktop browser. This will show you what your site looks like on different screen sizes.

For a site to be responsive "work well on all screen sizes" the styles applied to the objects on your page need to take into account the width of your screen using %, vm etc. If for example you have given a div a fixed width, 500px, then on a screen smaller than 500px part of the div will not be visible or will need a sideways scroll to view it.
Depending on your design, you might want the divs to resize and keep the same layout or you might want them to rearrange to put important sections to the top or a combination. So you are unlikely to get a quick any easy answer on how to fix your site but there are lots of courses and article on responsive design available.
If you are using WordPress there are a few plugins, that will, with varying degrees of success, try to make your site responsive.
Not saying that this applies to you, but due to visitors perceptions, i.e. first impression applies to whole business, for many businesses no website at all would be better than a crap, home made website.

Graham · 24-07-2017 11:00am

Andy From Sligo wrote: »

Is there something I could do like submit/upload my desktop website to somewhere (automated, ie not done by a person) and it could optimise it for mobile phones? - does such even exist? - been googling but havent found anything yet.

Short answer, no. It's something that's pretty much a fundamental part of the design and needs to be accommodated from the start.

jimmynokia · 24-07-2017 7:12pm

Wordpress automatically fixes sites into mobile view you have to enable it though

bapraster · 29-09-2017 9:46pm

Hi There I recommend to learn a bit of bootstrap when you working on your website, it is ready css standard and you only adding a classes to your html, there shouldn't be a problem for you if you know css and html standards, go and check https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/ I'm designer and front-end developer with 12 years of experience and I'm using bootstrap over 2 years and it is really handy

Andy From Sligo · 26-10-2017 1:31pm

ok back again - I think I am moving forward in the right direction now.

OK so where I am at the moment the index.html homepage does not have a message at the bottom when I open it on a mobile phone , but i added another page last night to my website http://www.pcrepairs.x10host.com/car_diagnose.html and yes! - that has a message at bottom of the screen 'make page mobile-friendly' - thats what I am looking for then, but I wonder why it does not do that on the homepage index.html?

I have checked the lines at the top of the source code on both pages and they both are the same

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">

before the <head> tag

any ideas?

daymobrew · 27-10-2017 8:40am

jimmynokia wrote: »

Wordpress automatically fixes sites into mobile view you have to enable it though

This is not true - it depends on the active theme, not WordPress. Having said that, most currently maintained themes are mobile friendly.

How do I get my current website looking decent on a mobile phone?

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