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We love data, and spend a lot of time monitoring the analytics on our websites. Any web developer doing the same will have noticed the increase in traffic from mobile devices of late. Over the past year we’ve seen many key sites garner a significant percentage of pageviews from smartphones and tablets. These represent large numbers of visitors, with sophisticated browsers which support the latest HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but which also have limited screen space with widths as narrow as 320 pixels. 

Our commitment to accessibility means we strive to provide a good browsing experience for all our users. We faced a stark choice between creating mobile specific websites, or adapting existing sites and new launches to render well on both desktop and mobile. Creating two sites would allow us to better target specific hardware, but maintaining a single shared site preserves a canonical URL, avoiding any complicated redirects, and simplifies the sharing of web addresses. With a mind towards maintainability we leant towards using the same pages for both, and started thinking about how we could fulfill the following guidelines: 

1. Our pages should render legibly at any screen resolution
2. We mark up one set of content, making it viewable on any device
3. We should never show a horizontal scrollbar, whatever the window size

Stacked content, tweaked navigation and rescaled images – Chromebooks

As a starting point, simple, semantic markup gives us pages which are more flexible and easier to reflow if the layout needs to be changed. By ensuring the stylesheet enables a liquid layout, we're already on the road to mobile-friendliness. Instead of specifying width for container elements, we started using max-width instead. In place of height we used min-height, so larger fonts or multi-line text don’t break the container’s boundaries. To prevent fixed width images “propping open” liquid columns, we apply the following CSS rule:

img {
  max-width: 100%;
}

Liquid layout is a good start, but can lack a certain finesse. Thankfully media queries are now well-supported in modern browsers including IE9+ and most mobile devices. These can make the difference between a site that degrades well on a mobile browser, vs. one that is enhanced to take advantage of the streamlined UI. But first we have to take into account how smartphones represent themselves to web servers.


When is a pixel not a pixel? When it’s on a smartphone. By default, smartphone browsers pretend to be high-resolution desktop browsers, and lay out a page as if you were viewing it on a desktop monitor. This is why you get a tiny-text “overview mode” that’s impossible to read before zooming in. The default viewport width for the default Android browser is 800px, and 980px for iOS, regardless of the number of actual physical pixels on the screen. 

In order to trigger the browser to render your page at a more readable scale, you need to use the viewport meta element: 

Mobile screen resolutions vary widely, but most modern smartphone browsers currently report a standard device-width in the region of 320px. If your mobile device actually has a width of 640 physical pixels, then a 320px wide image would be sized to the full width of the screen, using double the number of pixels in the process. This is also the reason why text looks so much crisper on the small screen – double the pixel density as compared to a standard desktop monitor. 

The useful thing about setting the width to device-width in the viewport meta tag is that it updates when the user changes the orientation of their smartphone or tablet. Combining this with media queries allows you to tweak the layout as the user rotates their device: 

@media screen and (min-width:480px) and (max-width:800px) {
  /* Target landscape smartphones, portrait tablets, narrow desktops

  */
}

@media screen and (max-width:479px) {
  /* Target portrait smartphones */
}

In reality you may find you need to use different breakpoints depending on how your site flows and looks on various devices. You can also use the orientation media query to target specific orientations without referencing pixel dimensions, where supported. 

@media all and (orientation: landscape) {
  /* Target device in landscape mode */
}

@media all and (orientation: portrait) {
  /* Target device in portrait mode */
}

Source : Google Webmaster Central