Discontinuing phone and tablet reformatting

September 24, 2012 by DickH Posted in Current Events 2 Comments

For some time I’d been concerned about the ability of smart phone users to access the content of this site in an easy to read manner. I found a plug-in that detected the type of platform being used to our site and, if it was a smart phone or tablet, this plug-in would reformat the content so that it would fit on the smaller screen. The problem is that many people use the iPad which doesn’t need this type of reformatting since it’s got a big enough screen. Consequently, I decided to turn off that feature until I can find something that distinguishes smart phones from tablets. Thanks for your patience through this experiment.

2 Responses to Discontinuing phone and tablet reformatting

  1. shawn says:

    did you try going into the settings and shutting off the “Show mobile to tablet devices?”
    I havent tried that yet, but I don’t have a tablet so can’t see the results.

  2. DickH says:

    I didn’t but I might try that in the near future. The feedback I received was that a (to me) surprisingly large number of people of all ages use tablets, mostly iPads, to access the web with some regularity. I had a sense that was happening but this experience really confirmed it. Over the coming weekend I’ll experiment with the settings of the app. I know at the bottom of the screen there was a “full view” button so that users could opt back into the traditional view of the website, but it seemed kind of burdensome to have them do that continuously. I’ll report back with a new post if I can re-activate the app in a way that excludes tablets from the condensed view.