The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful.
It’s difficult to have a nice “classic web” page that runs on phones without a lot of care to use media queries. Not that that’s a deal breaker but it quickly departs from the “keep it simple” philosophy of these designs when you are effectively designing it twice.
I see this complaint often, but I don’t get it. Zooming and panning are two dead simple gestures on any smartphone browser, no more difficult than scrolling. Out of all the annoyances I’ve encountered visiting a website on my smartphone, having to zoom or pan ranks near the bottom for me. Why is it such a nuisance for others?
Double tap can sometimes work.
The other issue is that now the website has two overflow axes. So I’m just kinda wandering a page in some way that wasn’t designed by the author. To each their own but it feels janky and uncomfortable to have to wander a page. Especially if the page was designed with a certain viewport size in mind. They’re not expecting this case.
(Of course, really old HTML that uses table based layout has problems.)
> I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.
If you start from unstyled HTML it works. My question is what are you adding in your development process of making simple websites that breaks it for phones?