Website Owners - Are You Mobile Friendly? (1 Viewer)

[magicsurfbus]

On a recent visit to my web hosting provider's site, a message popped up that may be of interest to those of you with sites that generate income (or user interest).

Basically it would appear that Google are about to change the relevance algorithm in their search engine to acknowledge that around 50% of all searches are conducted on small-screen portable devices like tablets and phones.

Their search engine will now consider how mobile-friendly your site is, and rank you accordingly. Issues like ease of navigation, font size, image size and simplicity of page structure will have more of an influence on search rankings than before.

There are various responses to adopt - perversely one of them is to restructure your website in the simpler (dare I say retro) hand-coded HTML design style we all know and love from the late 90s. No tables or complications - just simple paragraphs that expand or contract widthways for comfort.

There are other ways of course.

Most importantly, if your site is designed and maintained by a third party you might want to ask them what they're planning to do about all this.

 

[GJH]

There are various responses to adopt - perversely one of them is to restructure your website in the simpler (dare I say retro) hand-coded HTML design style we all know and love from the late 90s. No tables or complications - just simple paragraphs that expand or contract widthways for comfort.

Nothing perverse about that. Apart from using Paint Shop Photo Album to generate web pages for sets of photos (which I then edit by hand as necessary) I always hand code. My software of choice is Kevin Gunn's Web-O-Rama. It's easy to code tables which expand/contract according to the limits of the device being used.

The Motorhome Parking web site was always designed as text only to promote fast download. Back in 2006 when it originated mobile speeds (and screens) were a lot less capable than today.

 

[magicsurfbus]

I always hand code... The Motorhome Parking web site was always designed as text only to promote fast download. Back in 2006 when it originated mobile speeds (and screens) were a lot less capable than today.

I learned HTML at night school around that time and hand-coded my first website. Now I use Dreamweaver, but I frequently tweak their page code using my HTML knowledge from the olden days.

The tipping point between desktop and mobile device appears to be the 1024 pixel screen width. Above 1023 you might as well assume it's a desktop or laptop, whilst below 1024 you should optimise for mobile (ie bigger text, smaller graphic files, simpler (if any) tables). There's a very nifty line of Javascript that detects the screen width of the device and can redirect the user to the appropriately-formatted page:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--if (screen.width <= 1023) {window.location = "http://www.mysite.co.uk/mobile/index.html";}//-->
</script>

Where /mobile is a sub-folder containing the mobile version of your site

Of course there's all manner of CSS jiggery pokery that'll resize page content and jump through digital hoops to meet mobile users' demands, but I prefer simplicity.

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[Bill_OR]

Thanks for the info - particularly the bit about not using the <table> function. I'll think about restructuring some of the pages on our village website - www.fairlight.org.uk

 

[GJH]

I prefer simplicity.

As so often, the keyword is KISS

 

[DBK]

Some sites have a mobile version but I find using a 7" tablet I don't need it but sometimes I don't have a choice. Whenever I try to access the weather site www.yr.no it inevitably defaults to their mobile site www.m.yr.no which was previously pretty useless but they are now trially a beta version of a new mobile site which is much better. www.beta.yr.no/en

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[Robert Clark]

We just updated our website so it adapts automatically, not only to mobile devices as s whole, but specific screen sizes depending on which phone/tablet you are using.

 

[magicsurfbus]

Having gone for the /mobile sub-folder with redirection option, I'm wondering if the mobile version should now become the main site to enable proper Googlebot spidering, and the desktop version be put in a sub-folder for redirection, if you get my drift.