My site is non responsive to mobiles http://goo.gl/yZpRCv. AKA it has a min-width of 960px with a bit of side padding. It does scale to larger widths. Just not smaller.
I know what this does. My site actually looks better without because it zooms it out a little more than needed with the meta in place. But not by much.
What are your guys thoughts on this meta on a fixed width site? My view is… it’s not really needed. However it will do no harm. It may help seo as google will see my site as more assessable. I get conflicting info on the web about it in regards to fixed width sites.
If you aren’t using media queries to control the layout then don’t add the meta tag.
Once you add that meta tag then devices will say “Ok you control the layout then” and your 960px+ site will now render at 980px on a 320px window meaning most of it is off screen.
It’s really simple and you only add the viewport meta tag when you are controlling the design to make it fit (i.e. responsive).
I hate mobile sites. Maybe in the future I will tweak it to scale. But it is a lot of work. My time is better spent on seo at this point. A client would be nice.
So actually I guess I don’t know what it does. Because I thought scale=1 would say 100%. It scales my iPhone to the top left corner on initial page load. So 100% of the iPhone. 33% of my site. Google does say to say this though as it says then css pixels = device pixels. Or some nonsense
Yes you never really use that without the initial scale.
Initial scale of 1 basically means don’t shrink my layout to fit in your small viewport.
In this post I make some extensive demo tests as to what happens when initial scale of 1 is omitted.
It can be mind-bending trying to work out all the combinations but in the end for normal sites it really is just a matter of omitting the viewport meta tag if you have done nothing special for mobiles with media queries. If you have made the site responsive with media queries then add the viewport meta tag with initial scale set to 1.
That’s confusing stuff. I read the html boy saying don’t use it. But then I got Google yelling at me all over the place to add it. It even says add it for fixed width. But I beleive you guys more and my own eyes. I removed the meta. Thanks for your explanations
. Simply curious.