My giant mistake on mobile phone layouts and why I should have known better

This is bang your head against the wall, repeatedly, time. I know mobile phones are incredibly important in church communication today and getting more so all the time.

I know how important it is for your website to responsive, that means that it looks good on all devices from computer screen to tablet to video. I even wrote an article and did a video about it.

And I know WordPress automatically adjusts articles to fit on your phone.

But what I didn't do was check how my current home page actually looked on my phone. Until this afternoon that is, and then the head banging against the wall started.

Motivated by a desire to share content with pastors and other leaders I learned about my mistake

I spend most of every day at the computer and I know many of you do also and so for my new layout and site organization I tested all sorts of things on the computer. I was particularly happy with the little icons I had the head of the home page and thought they were such a neat way to organize things into overall content areas.

Today I was thinking about how the article going out tomorrow would be good to pass on to church leaders to read. They don't involve many images so I was thinking you could forward them and then your pastor might read them on his or her phone.

Worked out fine for the article.

But then I decided to check the home page of the website. The cute little icons I used broke the design and caused the home page to be a series of letters going on from screen to screen in long stringy lines. I thought about taking a picture of the mess and showing it to you, but it was too awful and I couldn't delete it fast enough.

I switched back to the former theme I used and though I now must figure out a new organizational system at least you can read things on your phone easily.

This was after I realized the BIG mistake I was making with my newsletter

Again, I had tested numerous layouts and templates and all kinds of things to make sure the newsletter looked good on the computer and looked good in the process of linking and via email.

And then I looked at it on my phone and was horrified that the first thing you saw was this big, screen-filling picture of me. (It was a little one to the side on the of the online version). You had to scroll down to get any content. I had a number of "unsubscribes" when I first sent this out and now I know why.

Also, most of the pictures didn't even come up.

That's when I decided to check out the website. . . . . .

What I'm doing now

After the beating up myself subsided (temporarily at least) I fixed what I could for now, but will have lots more to do in the coming days.

I'm sharing this because I do want you to be able to share the content I send out with your pastoral staff and other volunteers and now you can do that without embarrassing yourself.

Lots more on this it the coming days--I'm going to bed.