ADMIN: This site in mobile browsers

  • I permanently deactivated my Twitter account in January 2023. Links to the account below aren’t functional anymore.

I have a smart phone, too, now – an Android phone – and was curious for how this site looks like in a mobile browser recently:

See the message on Twitter.

The dictionary page as displayed on my phone
The dictionary page as displayed on my phone

The biggest problem at least on mobile Chrome seems to be that the submenus don’t work – in a non-mobile browser, you hover the cursor over a navigation-bar menu item and a submenu pops up in some cases. If on a touchscreen, you tap on an item in the navigation bar with your finger, instead of a submenu popping up and staying there for you to choose maybe an item from the submenu, the page reloads with the link behind the navigation-bar menu item you tapped on, except if you are quick enough to unfocus the link by slightly dragging your finger away to the side. This certainly isn’t optimal, especially since my server logs suggest that rather many visitors use their phone or tablet to access this site, so I think that I should accommodate those visitors.

WordPress is fortunately flexible enough that porting a site from one theme (currently a modification of Twentyeleven) to another isn’t too big of a deal, but it’s still work that I don’t really have the time for right now, what with the semester at university having just started again. I guess, for the time being, just keep in mind that I’m aware that this site isn’t really good to use on a phone and maybe, if you want to more seriously look around here, probably better do so with a non-mobile browser.

Of course, if you know any workable fix for the menu bar issue, let me know. My own googling wasn’t so successful in this regard, except that I found other people have the same problem and were told to simply use a different, more recent theme that’s explicitly marked as suitable for mobile browsers (the buzzword here being “responsive”).