This isn't the fault of mobile devices, it's web designers going crazy with technology simply because they can. Remember the days when every website had blinking GIFs, "under construction" signs, yellow text on black background with blinking start and possibly even played music when you visited it?
http://gizmodo.com/5983574/remember-the-hilarious-horror-of-geocities-with-this-website
(trust me, it's worse in motion)

If yo want to see a website that looks good both on desktop and touchscreen devices, visit the Apple website, they haven't changed anything since the release of the iPhone. Or even take GOG's website as an example, I can navigate it just fine on my tablet.

Well, as long as they work also on my desktop PC... I guess web sites will have to start catering more and more for touch devices as well.

Which reminds me, I find GOG pages to be pretty hard to use on touch devices, mainly due to those floating menus where you are supposed to just hover a mouse pointer over the menus, not to click on anything. How do you simulate mouse hover with a tablet or smartphone? The funny thing is that to me GOG pages seem to work better on my ancient non-touch Nokia E66 semi-smart phone, than on modern tablets and smartphones with touch controls.


Anyway, what concerns me more as a desktop PC user is that it seems there will be more and more services and such where computer users apparently will be left out completely. The services are very tablet/smartphone centric, and might not even work at all on PCs, even partially. So you can't necessarily choose to have e.g. a PC instead of a tablet, you will have to have a tablet (or phablet, or a high-end smartphone) for certain things.

If Facebook was created today, I wouldn't be surprised it would be tablet/smartphone-only service, with no way to access it with your PC/Mac (e.g. with a browser).

Also, now some schools even here seem to have gone to the tablet craze, with your homework and demos being made with tablets. Apparently using e.g. a laptop instead for the same is not an option, it has to be a tablet (and even a certain kind of tablet, namely iPad (yuck)).

How do you manage the floating GOG menus on a tablet? I've yet to figure that out. To me GOG pages are harder to use with a tablet than most other web sites.

Yeah, I hate touch devices. Too much effort. I'm waiting for them to make brain jacks so I can just think my way through content.

Be careful what you ask for...

Are you using Android, iOS or something else?

On Android, if I tap on e.g. Browse Games or My Account on a tablet, it is registered as a mouse click and goes directly into e.g. My Games page, without showing me the menu options (e,g, under "My Account" => My Games / Messages / Forum Replies / Logout). You see those when you hover (not click) the mouse pointer on top of the "My Account" link.

iOS on the iPad. Tapping "Browse Games" has the same effect as hovering above it on my desktop computer, it just folds out the menu, it doesn't change the page.

I can't get the Browse Games and My Account drop down menus(is that what they are called?) to work on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone or my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. So for me GOG.com isn't working well on mobile devices.

The GOG website, on the other hand, is a total nightmare to use on my phone or tablet :D

Interesting, so iOS seems to work differently in that regard then, compared to Android (at least that Android version I've been using).

So if you want to click e.g. Browse Games (not just hover over it), how do you do that? Double-tap, or tapping longer, or something else?

Double-tap works.

Tab 2 user here. Using the default browser (Google Chrome), put your finger on a mouseOver menu for about half a second and swipe down to extend the menus. Perhaps this is an android-wide feature not limited to Google Chrome, but I have yet to try different browsers for my tablet so can not confirm.

Back to the original topic, I think it is true that webdesign these days is in a dark era. It is very time consuming (and therefore expensive) to run both a regular and a "mobile" version of the same site. Sure, some blog type designs work because they are working with simple templates and I'm sure we will see more web design solutions for simultaneous content updates for both regular and mobile versions of sites.

Right now however many are going the cheap way of not running two separate sites (and if they do, one version tends not to get much love with stripped out features and stripped out content, which is ridiculous for news websites and visual media sites. Sadly we will have to suffer some sites deciding that going mobile friendly for the time being is the best way to go in this compromise.

Personally I ALWAYS go for regular non-mobile versions with my 7" tablet. Always read horizontally, most websites have a fixed width anyhow, you're supposed to scroll down no matter what platform you are on. Now that I think about it: Mobile versions of sites are a waste of development time and money, they are not necessary except to make the (admittedly large) computer illiterate crowd a bit more docile.

I refuse to believe that that kind of website design is happening solely "because they can". It has touch device written all over it. One big *thpectacular* cover page filling the whole screens with very few clickable elements? Further content easily accessible with a swipe? Even if that kind of thing has only become technically possible now, there is no way in hell it would be applied so much and in such a manner if it weren't for this ridiculous focus on touch devices.
Well, I'm not complaining that much about the GOG website because its main purpose is exclusively aimed at desktop/laptop users and oddly enough I had no *serious* trouble making purchases through my phone during one of the sales (when I was overseas and had no access to a PC). But yeah, would be great if they provided an alternate page for mobile devices for people who just wish to make purchases or check something on the forums.

Tap once to open the menu, tap a second time to click the link. Tapping longer is like doing a right-click.

I actually really like the GOG website and don't want it to change. Well, let me rephrase, I really like the aesthetic and Barefoot Essentials makes up for many of the major shortcomings. Or maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome...