With mobile traffic now up around 50% this announcement from Google carries some weightâ¦
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.
So if your site isn’t responsive, now is the time to do so. My forum site is responsive and I’ve been working on a responsive Wordpress theme for rawtop.com. But I don’t think I’ll have my tube site ready by then unless I concentrate pretty heavily on getting it done.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Not surprised by this at all, my network is probably 80% responsive at this point. Will need to address this as I’m not looking to change themes at this point.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Well I received a warning from Google Webmaster Tools that my main blog is not mobile friendly some time in beginning of January. I bought some nice responsive theme but it didn’t jive well with the surfers. So I reverted to the older theme for now. I think I will opt for a dedicated designer who will (hopefully) manage to make the current theme mobile friendly.
Does anybody know where such designers can be found and what’s the usual cost of such a project?
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Does anyone have a suggestion for a good, mobile-friendly Tumblr theme? I’m looking for something that’s clean and modern. Here’s what most of my Tumblr blogs look likeâ¦
I found a free responsive theme that more or less similar to that, but even though it was responsive it didn’t pass Google’s “mobile friendly” test. The test said the links were too close together.
There’s ‘Vesper’, but I’m not paying $49/site. I’m looking for something free or close to it.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
BTW, I see a lot of people using the Lookbook theme, but IMHO, the mobile experience is worse â even though Google likes it. I mean this is not a good mobile experienceâ¦
The text totally gets in the way of the image that people are there to seeâ¦
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
I must have just tried out about a dozen different themes. Each one had at least one serious problem. So I’m back to square one. However, in the meantime I’ve turned on the “use default mobile theme” option under customize. That changes the mobile experience for iPhone and Android users (but thankfully not iPad users). It’s enough to make Google think the site is mobile friendly. However, it’s not the mobile UX I really want, and I don’t know if it will fire Google Analytics tags, etc.
However, most Tumblr users probably use the app anyway. I’m not sure how big of a deal this really is.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Thanks Poco, I actually like that mobile theme (from Jetpack) but unfortunately my surfers don’t. Whenever I turn on that mobile theme, ALL my mobile/tablet surfers completely disappear from GA’s realtime stats… which is probably because they think they landed on a wrong blog, or just plain don’t like that theme.
I suppose I will have to hire a designer to adjust my current themes for mobile and tablet devices.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Yeah, G spams me with such emails every day now.
Unfortunately I’m too busy with more important things than to just jump through another burning hoop G waves in front of my nose. They really know how to keep webmasters busy. :fuck:
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Funny thing is that I hate how my site looks on mobiles, it’s not a great user experience in my opinion. But Google gives it a thumbs up and hates the non-responsive version. (I can flip flop with the click of a button in the theme’s settings.)
It’s funny how Google keeps wagging the dog’s tail and everyone says, “How high?” Remember how they told us links or unique content were very, very important?
I hate surfing YouTube on Chrome on my tablet, the videos are all over-optimized. Someone just told me they play better on the YT app, but I haven’t had time to bother with it.
Everyone will be jumping through those flaming hoops to make their sites look like crap until Google decides that responsiveness isn’t as important as whatever they’re dreaming up as we speak.
In the meantime, my site validates as mobile-friendly with them, so I’ll get back to creating content for my visitors.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
[QUOTE=Ben;157176]Thanks Poco, I actually like that mobile theme (from Jetpack) but unfortunately my surfers don’t. Whenever I turn on that mobile theme, ALL my mobile/tablet surfers completely disappear from GA’s realtime stats… which is probably because they think they landed on a wrong blog, or just plain don’t like that theme.
I suppose I will have to hire a designer to adjust my current themes for mobile and tablet devices.[/QUOTE]
Have you tried WPTouch? Like JetPack, it creates a separate mobile version of a site. And it only takes about two minutes to customize so the logo and color scheme matches the desktop version.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
When you decide to redesign your site to be fully responsive, it becomes a bit of a headache to the web designer, who has to basically become a css/js guru overnight. The artistic values of a good designer get diluted by the technicalities of programming. To solve this, most designers will opt for bootstrap. Not really a great problem until you realize that more and more sites are getting this really “conformed” look and feel due to the basics of bootstrap. It seems to be sterilizing websites and the weird and whacky websites will disappear from googles results. To be left with only the bootstrap look and feel.
Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21
Unfortunately you are right, using bootstrap often mean your site ends up looking similar to many others. But it’s increasingly difficult to design sites from scratch, it’s just not possible to test and create your own frameworks without a team of designers. Frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation takes away the hassle. I wouldn’t ever go back to designing everything from scratch. But you could say the same with WordPress or Blogspot, it’s given people a way to publish their own content but many sites end up looking very similar.
