Going Mobile : WCC Zonals

Although I ended the previous post on the subject, Going Mobile : WCC Site, with the promise 'More tests to follow...', my first action was to make the same changes -- title & viewport -- on my zonal pages. There are currently around 40 pages in this topic, which is stored in its own directory.

The 'mobile-friendly' tests on the updated pages were not encouraging. The index page, World Chess Championship Zonals, received a rating of 'Not mobile-friendly' (see google.com/ webmasters/ ...wcc-zonl), as did the most recent page on a single cycle, C26: Zonals 2012-2013. Only the associated page, C26: Zonal Qualifiers, merited the welcome message, 'Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.' It was time to dig a little deeper.

Going back to the updates for 'WCC Site', I had noted that the three index pages, while all having a similar structure, don't all pass the mobile-friendly test. After a few simple tests, I discovered that the table-based structure was itself the issue. In brief, mobile devices don't display tables very well. Large tables must be scrolled both horizontally and vertically, which requires two hands, but mobile users often work with a single hand. In fact, on top of the small screen, this is one of the most important constraints in mobile design -- mobile users don't want to use two hands -- which is why the pinch and zoom operations to navigate a non-mobile page get thumbs-down on the mobile-friendly tests.

The next set of mobile updates will be for my About.com material. Since these pages also use a table-based structure, I'm not expecting much joy.