[cpsns]

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance.

My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine.

It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

[bdw5204]

I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version.

If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you.

I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.

[masswerk]

On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract…

So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.

[AndrewStephens]

That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.

[TheRealDunkirk]

What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.

[AndrewStephens]

Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.