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my site is 16 years old and still looks great on a desktop monitor but looking at the statistics 60% of visitors enter my mobile devices my question is there a simple zoom script to mimic the finger pinch, I'm not going to redesign thousands of pages just to satisfy mobile punks.

and the responsive design screws up my beautiful design for desktop displays

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    I am not sure why you are calling mobile users punks. It does not make sense. People and work is more mobile these days. Making my antiques business site mobile increased sales by nearly double and allowed travelers to find my business while on the road. People have come across the country from Washington state to Pennsylvania because they saw my site while working their mobile welding business. Hardly a punk. They bought $1500 and came back and bought another $500 worth of antiques. Mobility allows for more opportunities. Not punks. Just people who are in the move. – closetnoc Feb 19 '18 at 6:48
  • my site is a download site to a desktop PC so mobile users are worthless to me – Terep Feb 19 '18 at 15:05
  • Except that I research software for my desktop using my tablet all the time. I just feel you are making too many assumptions. – closetnoc Feb 19 '18 at 17:23
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Actually, responsive web design is really easy to implement in this day and age. Gone are the days when you needed to design two different sites, or compromise on your overall layout to make everyone happy.

With media queries in your css code, you can easily design things so that your visitors with desktop displays are still seeing the exact same site they've been seeing, while changing the layout for your mobile visitors so that they can also enjoy your content.

Here's a great (free) tutorial on the subject if you'd like to learn more about responsive design.

I was hesitant at first as well with my commercial sites, but the truth is mobile is now a huge chunk of the market and you MUST accommodate those users in some form or fashion or risk losing market share and visitors.

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  • Well like the udacity course said responsive sites is an art not a science my site has 3 main columns that run parallel to each other to the bottom of the page, if I were to use the responsive site it would not look good my oage looks beautiful on a desktop display and just looks small on moble devices – Terep Feb 19 '18 at 6:29
  • Well, the easy solution would be to put a simple 100% container around everything. For your desktop users, you could leave things exactly as they are. For your mobile users, you could do as much or as little as you wanted to; but at bare minimum you could create the zoom effect like you wanted by enlarging the fonts. But the point to take away here, is that you do NOT have to change the way your site looks to desktop users in order to make changes to help the mobile users. – Keith Feb 19 '18 at 6:38
  • @Terep Keith is perfectly right. Any site can be made mobile friendly with a few relatively simple changes. It can be tough at first, but once you get it, it will go fast and apply to all pages. The hardest part is simply prioritizing what is most important for a user to see. After that, it is just a matter of executing the vision. There is no short cut for this. No script. CSS is actually far easier to implement. You just have to dive in and do the work. Mobile is very important these days. I am using a smallish tablet right now. Why open a laptop? It does not make sense. – closetnoc Feb 19 '18 at 6:38
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    The other issue you're going to start running in to is that the search engines, and specifically google, are starting to penalize sites that aren't mobile friendly at all. In fact, if you use their webmaster Google Search Console and you have a site that doesn't offer a mobile version they now warn you and suggest making changes. My GUESS is that in a couple years they'll start filtering out non-responsive content quite a bit more. – Keith Feb 19 '18 at 6:40

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