Making a site mobile friendly is an ongoing process. We’ve been working on it roughly since forever. The fact is, a huge portion of users to a site are going to be mobile users. In a blog-style gaming vertical like ours, that numbers is going to be 50% or higher. So we always knew mobile had to be an experience that was quick and easy. To that end, we haven’t done terribly, but we’ve definitely made mistakes.

How Mobile Can Make Things Slow

In the past months, we completely redesigned much of our site. Users wouldn’t know it just by coming, but we’ve tidied things up pretty considerably in efforts to increase site speed. Since we used a website builder (WordPress in our case) we had a lot of options available for how to make things responsive. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have any developers in the beginning, so we did the simplest thing we could.

That meant every page and post of our site had two versions – a mobile version, and a desktop version. The only problem was that every time someone would visit the site, their device would start to load both at the same time, which not only meant weird elements shifting on the initial load, but it meant a slower experience.

Was it functional? Sure. Was it cumbersome? Oh yeah, it was.

Recently we’ve been in a position to start fixing the patchwork job we did in the beginning (there’s still plenty to do). For mobile, that means going through and eliminating those duplicate elements to make the site faster and the mobile side cleaner.  What we learned was one of the best ways to make your site slow is to do a bad job on responsiveness. On the plus side, we at least knew one of the ways to make the site faster. We’ve also had a lot of help from actual developers (which we didn’t have in the beginning), and that has made it a lot better.

How to Make Things the Hard Way

A funny thing happens when you build your site one piece at a time – mobile side suffers. A pretty common phrase thrown around is ‘mobile-first’, meaning you prioritize building out the user experience for mobile users above all others. When we first had the idea for the site, we tried to do a lot of research, but there just isn’t as much out there as there could be.We did find lots and lots of articles about how the website quartz focused on mobile first to great success. Basically everyone agreed – this is a good way of doing things.

We did things the other way – the bad way – because we didn’t know how to do it any other way. We also didn’t have a lot of choices at the time. Have you ever had a moment where you do something wrong, and you know it’s wrong, but you also know it’s all you can do? It’s like using a paper towel as toilet paper because maybe you forgot you were supposed to dip by the store. So we designed for desktop because it was all we knew how to do. If we were lucky, mobile just looked like a kind of paired down version. More often than not, though, the images were way too huge, the spacing between modules was gigantic, and everything was way out of whack. This is still something we are fixing, but it’s a slow process because we built everything this way. We probably took Tony Stark’s advice – “Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk,” a little too much to heart. We’re still paying the price for that one, but we have a lot of smart people helping us fix it.

It has also been kind of fun though. Figuring out how to do a collage as a slider on mobile was a blast. It’s like seeing an old car and trying to figure out how to clean it up. Figuring out the best way to do esport player and team pages on mobile was a huge discussion that boiled down to – Hey! Why don’t we just make everything smaller?

It’s very easy to overthink things when working on making everything mobile, and we did plenty of overthinking.

Where Are We Now?

A good place. The homepage, esports page, and news page have all been finished. The player and team pages for esports are just about finished. That’s good too because we want to create a template we can replicate across a ton of esports, so doing it correct now will be super duper handy for the future. Next, we will work on making our posts completely perfect (there is still some minor tweaking). It’s a good place to be moving forward.

We also know that anything we develop in the future will be done either mobile-first, or we will build desktop and mobile simultaneously. It’s a lot easier that way, and we actually have the resources (developers) to do it. Besides, when we get our whole creative team in a room, it’s easier to throw all the designing and creative choices they’ll need to consider at them at one time. They get restless otherwise.

That doesn’t mean we don’t think there isn’t room to improve. There is, and there always will be. With some help from the community and each other, we’ll continue to see what we are doing wrong and what we could do better.

What Are We Doing with Mobile in the Future?

A lot. We have a lot of big plans for user functionality on the site, and that means making it easy and fun for users to do these things from mobile. We want users to have cool options to interact with one another and the site, but we have to make sure that is doable from mobile. Step one is just figuring out the nuts and bolts, step two is applying the lessons we learned – mobile first.

We are also super interested in how to work in a multimedia environment. We have big plans to work with streamers and YouTubers – maybe to even find a way of sponsoring or partnering with all you crazy kids who want to get started in the industry. Making video translate onto mobile can be a hassle though, so we know looking ahead, we will have to be careful that we are designing an experience that is functional and engaging.

On a final note – the goal is simplicity. The goal is saying, “What do gamers or esport fans want?” Sometimes those answers are easy because we are gamers and we are esport fans. Sometimes its harder because one opinion doesn’t reflect a community. At the end of the day though, we are designing for a community, and the best way to make something better is to tell us how. Don’t be shy! Tell us if you have thoughts on mobile or anything else. We promise we will read them and respond. Really.

Until next time,
KingTon