Yesterday we discovered that just over half of you use a computer to access this blog, while one in seven visits are via tablet and only a third of you are reading on your phone.
One reason for the low mobile percentage is that most of my audience are over 30, so there's probably a computer or a laptop in the house. But I suspect the main reason is that this blog looks better on a computer, and less good on a mobile. Sorry.
This blog looks best on a computer because, back when I started in 2002, there were no tablets or smartphones. Screen widths were a lot narrower back then too, so I generally tried to ensure my blog rendered well at just 800 pixels wide, and have maintained that aspiration ever since. Over the next decade screens only got wider, which was fine, until mobile browsers came along and suddenly thin-and-deep joined the party. Mobile browsers usually have a screen that's only 320-420 pixels wide, so any webpage still optimised for double that is in big trouble.
I ran a screen width survey back in 2005, and over 100 readers responded. I've reproduced the results below. It's astonishing how things have changed since 2005, with technology unexpectedly leading us towards portrait rather than landscape.
Screen width (the results)
• 2% of blog readers don't see this sentence as a single line of text.
• As many as a quarter of blog readers fail to read this sentence as a single line of text.
• Approximately 40% of you are able to read that last sentence without a line break... but not this one.
• About a quarter of you use browsers or screen resolutions allowing you to read this sentence in a single line of text.
• Only 20% of blog readers (including myself) can read this long sentence all in one go without the end dropping onto the next line.
• And just 3% of blog readers appear to be using a screen width sufficient to read the whole of this sentence in one single line with no line break.
My blog's template is essentially a variable-width column of text with a thin fixed bar down one side, a flexibility which has served it well over the years. Works well on computer screens. Looks good on a tablet. But my template is also essentially twenty years old, hence mobile-unfriendly and way out of date, and nothing that best practice on the modern interweb should be. I'm still HTML. I should at least be CSS.
Google used to love my blog and rank it highly in search engines, but now hates it because it fails on three elementary design factors.
i)Text too small to read
"The font size for the page is too small to be legible and would require mobile visitors to “pinch to zoom” in order to read" [my font size is fixed at 10pt, sometimes smaller, but ought to be something variably clever]
ii)Clickable elements too close together
"Touch elements, such as buttons and navigational links, are so close to each other that a mobile user cannot easily tap a desired element with their finger without also tapping a neighbouring element" [all those links in my sidebar are screwing accessibility, even though most viewers hardly ever click on them]
iii)Viewport not set
"Your page does not define a viewport property, which tells browsers how to adjust the page’s dimension and scaling to suit the screen size" [there wasn't a 'viewport' property in 2002, and I have never added one]
According to Google's indexing protocols every single page on my blog is 'invalid'. Unless I address their three issues and make my blog more mobile-friendly, that won't change. It's OK, diamond geezer does still appear in their search results, just not as high as it once did. If I wrote this blog for profit Google's pessimism would worry me and I would take action, but it's your bad luck that I don't.
Most mobile browsers have a screen reader mode which strips out the majority of the formatting and presents the content as plain text with photos and links. I presume a lot of you with mobiles read my blog that way. But Google doesn't care that my blog's template is easily bypassed, it only sees the underlying abomination which I've never got round to updating.
I like having a template I understand, and can fiddle with under the bonnet, rather than some opaque responsive off-the-shelf gizmo. I like the page's simplicity, and the bespoke indexing down the right hand side, and the fact there's no longer anything on the internet like it. I am of course blinkered by the fact that the blog looks absolutely fine to me on my laptop, but my smug inertia is undoubtedly deterring additional readers.
I'm delighted to discover that a third of you are accessing the blog on a mobile, because it's not put you off. But with the majority of my readers preferring the computer screen, contrary to popular usage, I need to be careful I don't stubbornly condemn this blog to ultimate oblivion.
