PC.net is Mobile-Friendly

December 2, 2019 — by Per Christensson

As of 2019, PC.net is officially mobile-friendly! This is an exciting announcement and great news for the future of the website, but it begs the obvious question: What took so long? Here are a few reasons.

1. The desktop version of the PC.net scaled pretty well on mobile. The text was legible and most links could be tapped without much difficulty.

2. Based on the nature of the content, most PC.net visitors come from a desktop or laptop computer.

3. I've received surprisingly few requests for a mobile version of the website.

4. All of PC.net is coded from scratch, so developing a mobile-friendly version of the site required a substantial amount of work.

Even though PC.net looked decent on smartphones and other mobile devices, the appearance was not ideal. With 2020 around the corner, it was time to finally take the plunge. Over the past few weeks I worked together with another developer on my team create mobile-friendly or "responsive" versions of all the pages. We did most of the updates using CSS media queries, but we also updated some HTML and JavaScript.

The funny thing is, after all this work, you won't even notice the updates if you're using a desktop browser with a standard window size. However, if you shrink your window or view the site on a smartphone, you'll notice the layout has changed. The text is easier to read and the links are easier to tap. The top navigation has been significantly improved and you can now access the links to the main sections using the three-line menu button.

Over the past few years, I've received positive feedback regarding the desktop layout of the site, so I decided not to make any major changes to the desktop version of the site for now. We're still making a few mobile-friendly tweaks to the site, so expect a few minor changes over the coming weeks. If you have any comments regarding the new mobile site layout, please let me know!