Mobile view problem - viewport etc.

[dekatria]

Hello,

My site: rouletteforum.roulette30.com , according to google web tools, does not appear right in mobile devices :
- Viewport not configured
- Touch elements too close
- Small font size   

Could anyone please help me?

[Gwenwyfar]

Your forum doesn't have any sort of adaptation to mobile devices. Just resize your browser window and you'll see how it looks on a smaller screen. You'd need to make changes all over to adapt it.

You could give a look around for tutorials on @media queries and try to just resize/move/hide things with css so that it looks better for smaller screens;

[dekatria]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

You'd need to make changes all over to adapt it

I hate to hear this. :-)
Isn't there a way to fix most of the problems with a few changes?

Google says:

Pages optimized to display well on mobile devices should include a meta viewport in the head of the document specifying width=device-width, initial-scale=1.
<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Would this fix a good part of the problem? Where should I put this line?

To tell you the truth, personally I don't have a problem with the way my forum looks on mobile devices, but I think google penalizes non responsive sites. Btw, shouldn't there be a mobile version of my forum, like "wap" etc.? Did the template creator removed these options?

Thanks for any help or ideas.

[Gwenwyfar]

I'd ignore most of those google warnings, a bot can give you hints or maybe show you something you didn't notice before, but it can't really tell you how good your site is at a smaller width. You can try to "fix" them if you care about having google validate your site, but I'd just go by how your site actually is and looks and consider those points yourself and what you think is good enough.

Not sure why the complaint about font sizes for one, I still need to check where that comes from, but if it considers "a good font size" those sites that make everything huge and spread over your screen then its silly. It complains about the same thing on my forum and its pretty much default smf font sizes

Isn't there a way to fix most of the problems with a few changes?

There are many simple things you could make to improve it. For instance, the table with views/replies on index or messageindex gets all squished at a smaller size. You could hide that part so that there is more space for the rest. Or make the poster area inside each topic smaller, etc. I said all over just because its many small or tiny changes in many places, not because it is hard, it is easy, its just a lot of scattered small work if you go through the whole thing

For having or not a mobile version, that would depend on your theme or who made your themes. As far as I know there are many themes that don't have that. You could try asking your theme creator to add one, though.

Would this fix a good part of the problem? Where should I put this line?

Meta tags are added to the page header. That would be found on your theme's index.template.php file. That wouldn't do much, though.

[Kindred]

there are several responsive themes available these days...

and no - google does not penalize non-responsive sites. They don't care (or even look at that), since the googlebot is only looking at code - not actual layout.

there is a WAP mod, standard in SMF... but WAP means no graphics and minimal styling. It's designed for old-style phones.   Responsive != WAP.

[Gwenwyfar]

Ahh. Well, could try to find a similar one that has that then as an option. Or look at how other themes are made to get ideas

They don't care (or even look at that), since the googlebot is only looking at code - not actual layout.

You mean, they don't care while they're indexing/use the data they get separately? Because those complaints were still made out of googlebot info, not another site. Well, all the better, more reason to ignore their complaints

[dekatria]

Thank you very much for your replies  Fortytwo and Kindred.
Very helpful info.
If there is no other reply soon I will mark it solved.