Phones and Tablets

Like most web sites our hit stats tell us that an increasing number of our visitors are browsing our site using mobile phones and tablets, especially iPads. In fact, as the pie chart from our Piwik software illustrates, together they now comprise over 50% of our traffic. So we've been doing some work to try to improve how our web site looks on mobile phones and tablets.

The first big change is a redesign of the menus. The items on the menus are the same and although they look a little different now we've lost the "tabs" the way they're rendered on PCs remains basically the same where they're listed across the screen and you hover over the top level item to see the sub-menus. Similarly on large screen tablets you tap on the top level item to see the sub-menus.

However on smaller screen tablets and mobile phones the banner image changes to make sure you can still see Jessie and the menus automatically change to be arranged vertically, starting with the classic "burger" logo which you tap to open the menus.

Turning to individual pages we've reworked our home page for phones (as shown in this image) to get rid of the carousel of images, not least because of the bandwidth it uses having those images downloading. Instead we randomly display just one of our favourite Lake District photos every time you visit the page.

For the same reason we've also removed the photo carousel from the accommodation pages.

If you look at one of our walks from a device with a touch screen the map is now static, not scrollable, as we discovered that users found it difficult to get past the map (as, when they scrolled the page now, if they landed on the map the map started scrolling rather than the map). We've also made all the maps and the walk profile in the walks re-sizable so, if you tap on them, you can easily see the image full size and we have made each walk page generally render better on a smaller narrower screen while leaving the same basic design for people using PCs and laptops.

We've put similar efforts into improving the walk finder from all the many places where it's called.

We've not come up with a way of improving our forum for mobile users yet but if you are logging into the site we've created a log in page which is more user friendly for everyone than the standard page.

We hope you find these improvements useful. We've tested them using the mobile devices we have access to but if you find it's not as good as you would like on yours then please let us know by a screen shot.

You can find out how to take a screen shot here.

Tagged: news

You can comment on this post in our forum.