For those of you who have been looking for new bike trail updates (photos, videos), info on bike events or fitness products here is why I haven’t had a chance to add a lot of new content to the about-bicycles.com site or the Bike Blog recently.
I have just spent over a month doing a major conversion on this website to make it much more mobile-friendly. This website is well over 500 pages and I just installed the mobile changes yesterday.
about-bicycles new mobile format
As we all know, mobile devices (smart phones, tablet computers, etc.) are everywhere now and I know that over 1/3 of the visitors to this website get here via mobile devices so I thought it was important to make the site more mobile-friendly (which it now is – the blog and the website).
For the more technical readers out there I have converted the site to a Responsive Design format (liquid) using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I may post a page on this site with more of the technical details at some point but I am a little burned out on it now and actually want to get back to the bike, bike trails and fitness stuff on the site again.
Just for a summary, the text and photos on the about-bicycles.com website will now adjust to fit whatever screen/view port/device that is accessing the website. This will be most noticeable on smaller devices such as smart phones although the display will also be a little nicer on tablet computers too.
When viewing this site on a typical desktop or laptop computer you will not notice much of a difference other than the links at the top of the page are now in boxes with rounded edges. If you re-size the width of your browser window, however, you can see how the content adjusts to the size of the screen. Once the screen is around 500 pixels or less it will convert to a one-column format which is how it will be displayed on smart phones and smaller devices.
Generally, when you access a website, that is not mobile-friendly, on a smartphone the device will try to display the entire page and it will be very small (mostly unreadable). You then need to pinch the screen to make the display larger and you will also need to scroll back and forth as well as up and down to view the content.
The Old (left) and New (right) smart phone website display
Mobile-friendly sites (such as about-bicycles.com now) will display at a more readable size and most will display in one column on a smart phone so you only need to scroll up and down to read the page. The photo on the right shows how this site looked on an iphone before and after the mobile conversion.
Although the liquid, responsive design approach is widely accepted and I believe it is a much better way to accommodate mobile website visitors, many of the biggest sites on the internet maintain separate web pages for mobile and desktop visitors. They also have larger IT resources to handle the additional maintenance and are not usually as responsive as smaller sites such as about-bicycles.com.
I need to make one note on the conversions. This site has quite a few bike trail pages, photos and videos and some of the older bike trail pages and photo pages have not yet been converted (it will be obvious when you land on one of those pages). I will be working on these pages next so they will all be converted very soon. Also the bike trail videos may not work on all mobile devices.
OK, sorry if that got a little long. It was a big project and difficult to summarize in a few sentences so I just did the longer version.
Anyway, like I said, I really hope to be able to get out and get some new bike trail photos and updates soon (fall can be a great time for bike trail photos) so stay tuned for some more actual cycling updates.
P.S.
I also saw the Tour of Elk Grove show on Comcast a week or so ago and the show was done very well and it was really nice to actually see everything that was going on during the 3 day event.
The show will be aired 3 more times this month and you can see the schedule on this post HERE . You can also see our update, photos and video of the TOEG here