I recently read Carmel Galvin's excellent post Untangle those Blogger Knots. This set me thinking about a pet peeve of mine and a piece of advice I wish geneabloggers would heed from me.
I travel a lot and try to keep up with blog reading on my smartphone when I have a spare moment. I find it most irritating when I am unable to read a blog post because it is not optimised for mobile devices.
When some blogs display on a mobile device the font is so small that is is nearly impossible to read. On others the font is in a pale colour that is also hard to read, I am a fan of pale gray but not as a font on a white background. (I am thinking of one blog in particular that uses a Wordpress theme but there are several I follow that are difficult to read).
In this 21st century many folk like me use their smartphones for a lot of their internet browsing. You may be missing out on potential readers if your blog is hard to read on these devices.
Have you taken a look at how your blog displays on a smartphone? Is the font tiny? Does the reader have to do a lot of scrolling from left to right to read each line? Is there plenty of contrast between the font and background colours to make reading easy?
I realise that some bloggers do not have smartphones and are therefore unable to see how their blogs look on these devices. Perhaps you could ask a friend to view your blog on their smartphone. If you don't have a smartphone toting friend feel free to send me your blogs' URLs and I'll take a look for you.
I travel a lot and try to keep up with blog reading on my smartphone when I have a spare moment. I find it most irritating when I am unable to read a blog post because it is not optimised for mobile devices.
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| GeniAus - At sea on a smartphone |
In this 21st century many folk like me use their smartphones for a lot of their internet browsing. You may be missing out on potential readers if your blog is hard to read on these devices.
Have you taken a look at how your blog displays on a smartphone? Is the font tiny? Does the reader have to do a lot of scrolling from left to right to read each line? Is there plenty of contrast between the font and background colours to make reading easy?
I realise that some bloggers do not have smartphones and are therefore unable to see how their blogs look on these devices. Perhaps you could ask a friend to view your blog on their smartphone. If you don't have a smartphone toting friend feel free to send me your blogs' URLs and I'll take a look for you.
8 comments:
good advise but now I am paranoid LOL My blog is http://kebeni-goinghome.blogspot.com/ so feel free to take a look and let me know if you can read it with ease. Thanks
If you're using Blogger, you can preview the mobile site under "Theme" on the sidebar of the dashboard.
Thanks for the comment - I don't want to make you paranoid Kelli - will take a look at your blog - don't think I'm a follower - yet though I will be soon
Kelli, I can read your blog easily on my Galaxy 8 smartphone. Thanks.
Thanks for the mention, I've stopped playing with background colours on images and have responded to your post with a video post. Certainly agree about the pale grey text on white, drives my poor old eyes crazy!!
This is a very timely reminder Jill. I am trying to sneak in time to review my website and I am conscious that my No 1 fan walks around attached to her mobile device. Thank you for your peeve.
Great points. With my blog when you make the Firefox browser window thin like a mobile you get to see the mobile view as the theme is mobile responsive. If it is not a responsive theme the menu, images and text just do not adjust. Also there are mobile browser emulators for browsers such as chrome so us bloggers we have no excuse as it is easy to check even on a desktop screen what it will look like on a mobile. As for grey fonts and other grey things - they are a pain on one of my old very screens as I struggle to find things like grey search boxes and have to click around to find it so I can search.
Thanks all for your comments and for your guidance Carmel and Fran. Much appreciated.
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