Uh oh, it's Mobilegeddon! Your site may lose, well, pennies Google has adjusted its algorithms so websites it deems to be "mobile-friendly" will – from today, Tuesday – rank higher on the advertising colossus' search listings, if they are searched for from a mobile device. Inevitably, the move has triggered gripes to the effect that businesses – in particular small online players – …
Less adverts means greater retention by the public.
If you only see one advert in a day, then you're pretty likely to remember it. If you see 100, then you'll most likely become poster blind.
At the moment there are to many people trying to advertise in every scrap and corner they can. By making advertising space a more common commodity they effectively devalue it as well as undermine their ultimate goal, public retention.
Now imagine Google auctioning off exclusive adverts on their mobiles. How much would you company pay for guaranteed retention?
I'd go one further and say it pushes some of us away from the product or service being stuffed in our face every 5 mins.
Recently I've become increasingly irritated by having Amazon adverts for something I looked at earlier that day appearing in every sodding website I visit - or, cunningly (on chrome), eBay equivalents...
Seems a slightly blinkered assessment... there are a few businesses out there that use their websites to generate income in other ways than selling ad space... Shocking I know, but logical if you think about it - where do the ads come from after all :P
Anyway, finally got our site mobile friendly a couple of weeks ago, so bring it on.
With the increased use of mobiles to view the web it seems a reasonable idea to encourage sites to get mobile friendly. Hard to see any real competitive advantage it increases for G either, every mobile platform gets the 'better' sites whether Android,IOS,WP or something minor.
The Https tweak was always billed as "small"
This is being hyped (by the media at least) as a much bigger thing. I guess we will find out soon.
The fact is that Google have go a mobile friendly test tool
https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
so they are going to some effort.
Also I suspect that the Https change was more motivated by a desire to piss off NSA/GCHQ rather than any particular business requirement. This change may well have some proper teeth to it.
For most small businesses I think that the real issue will be if one of your competitors has media queries and you don't. If no one in your industry is mobile friendly then I suspect the search rankings will stay the same and no one will need to move. We'll see how good Google are when there is a rubbish but mobile friendly site Vs a good, retro site. How will they balance that out?
It's an ill-defined phrase that gets tossed around a lot and I'm mildly curious about Google's idea of 'mobile friendly'.
For my money it would have the same characteristics as 'a well designed website' - navigation links across the top (like the Reg's mobile page) followed by simple HTML. You know. The kind which was fairly common till the marketing 'creatives' got the web designers high on latte fumes and convinced them what the world needs is cascading, multi-level, mouseOver-driven menus, along with auto-playing videos and sites that simply can't function without flash.
Rather than harming small businesses, I think Google's decision could well benefit those businesses that aren't large enough to have marketing leeches spewing their 'creativity' over their company's website.
"So you want the internet to look generic? You want every site to have everything stacked in blocks?"
Better than the living hell of Flash, and all the ADHD inspired blinking, flashing, poppy-uppy sh** that web designers wallow in, whilst making the general UX poorer and more confusing, and making data and content subsidiary to self-aggrandising presentation. Just like the Graun has recently done.
How about we compromise? A few static pictures, embedded links, a small choice of fonts and colours would be all you're allowed.
"and I'm mildly curious about Google's idea of 'mobile friendly'."
Shall I Google that for you?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/helping-users-find-mobile-friendly-pages.html
The criteria are
* Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
* Uses text that is readable without zooming
* Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
* Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
In other words don't use Flash and design your website in 3 columns for 320, 640 and 960. For full marks make the font get bigger as the screen gets smaller.
If you are _actually_interested_ Google for "CSS media queries".
@themoose
Thanks for taking the time. My interest is not so much in the specific criteria so much as, given Google's huge impact on the internet, whether they're reasonably likely to promote their stated aim. From the list you've posted, it seems they are.
And for AC
"So you want the internet to look generic?“
Quick answer, yes.
The longer answer is that I rate "easy to read for those with less than perfect eyesight" and "simple HTML which is easy for screen readers to parse [for blind people]" over "look at this kewl trick I can do with JavaScript".
That said, I think the ideal situation would be for browsers to be good enough to enforce the user's wishes. For people with sight issues, the browser display black, 16pt sans-serif on a white background. For people who don't like 'generic', it displays every character in a different font, colour, size, blink, orientation and randomly bolds, italicises, underlines and super- or subscripts.
"* Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom" has been a campaign of googles when they arrogantly removed text reflow from chrome a few years ago, forcing users to have to scroll the page horizontally or zoom to read most websites. Incidentally that is why I don't use chrome on android.
For full marks make the font get bigger as the screen gets smaller. - THIS is the problem.
On smaller screens you end up seeing one word or less if you follow Google's guidelines. W3C say "normal font size=3" Google says you need 6 for mobile devices. WTF? Who sets teh standards? W3C or Google? If Google cant make their browser render the nominal standardized font in a readable way, why should Web designers change? Its IE6 all over again.
Dear Google,
The horse has already bolted!
Four years ago, mobile friendly meant "had to work on 2G and render on a 240x180 pixel screen". By the time most of this twaddle is implemented, the average mobile will be offering 4G and 1920x1080, which is probably better than a lot of desktops on broadband, and people will have learned that icons were great when you only had eight, but when you have upwards of 120 apps on your phone, then hierarchical text menus are the way to go.
Shove that up your Unity, Cannonical!
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Conflating mobile-optimised sites with mobile advertising is a red herring. This is about serving sites to mobile device users that work on mobile devices. I encounter lots of sites, both low budget home made html and big bucks sites that people have obviously paid a lot for that just don't cut it on a mobile.
I don't think a simple html site will necessarily do the trick either; in my experience it takes java script and css to figure out what device type and screen orientation combo is needed to display a site well on every device.
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I don't think a simple html site will necessarily do the trick either; in my experience it takes java script and css to figure out what device type and screen orientation combo is needed to display a site well on every device.
Not quite true. I'm one of those weird js-hating freaks. I do responsive sites without it, CSS and HTML only. I may be able to be enticed to give you an example but I think it falls foul of El Ref's rules, even if it was a customer's site.
The sites I do work fairly well on any device and if modern browser without special coding (mainly coz I'm lazy and barely know an HTML tag from my own backside)
Fair play to you, to be fair my 'experience' is somewhat limited but I couldn't figure out how to get a nice, responsive site that worked well on both mobile and desktop browsers in just HTML & CSS, hence my horrific descent into the 'joys' of javascript (probably at the suggestion of some web design guru on the t'interwebs). If you've got a number of menu options in the top bar and you want to control 'exactly' how something displays, well, I found it a challenge.
What really sent me over the edge and led to me redoing my site in Wordpress (I know, I know, but I really don't want to spend my time doing web stuff - there're only so many hours in the day) was IE11 completely stuffing the layout and rendering the site very badly, even after I'd got it working comparatively nicely in portrait and landscape modes on different devices.
I picked a mobile-optimised Wordpress theme, have virtually no plug-ins to manage (other than said theme and jetpack) and have a much nicer looking site that I can update easily and which passes google's test. BTW I have zero adverts on my site.
I wonder if the BBC web site counts as mobile friendly ?
Its bad enough having to click 10+ times to get to the start of a single ongoing story from a laptop, it must be even more frustrating from a phone. OTOH, it does have that lovely new layout.
Actually, what am I saying ?
10+ needless extra clicks on a web page - of course it will pass a Google check !
The Android generation of mobile phones are pretty impressive things, but when you have a browser that wants to resize a screenful of content to a 4 inch (or so) display and try to retrieve it all through a 2G rural link...let's say the experience persuaded me to implement a reduced size lower bandwidth version.
Google is happy with it. That'll do. I'm not fussed about the supposed advertising potential, I block adverts myself so it would seem rather hypocritical to put them on my site.
Apart from the predictable "my browser has no ads", there is a worrying perception here that commerce has no place on the internet. Particularly advertising.
Well, ahem, the market maker function, aka the stall keeper, has been around for a while and will probably outlast the people here on this forum. Yes, it's bigger and more corporate now, but more or less the same. Shout your wares and you may get lucky.
Now, the invisible hand needs some boundaries, and that is where we are floundering a bit in the internet age. As it seems, Europe is more prepared to set those boundaries than the US. China, I think, have no perception of public good, other than their own.
Mobilegeddon, evil or not, appears to be a response to changing market conditions. Adam would be proud.
I use adblock plus and not edge partly for that. I don't like being tracked, and I passionately hate flashing/moving ads, especially when reading technical content. I avoid brands whose adverts piss me off. For life. But I'll happily support text or static ads.
Text based ads are fine. If they fit reasonably with the content then I'll probably note them. If not I'll find a way to block them, and find an alternative brand to purchase from. Static images are fine. I could even accept the odd video add if it plays once and stops.
Annoying ads drive customers elsewhere. Or just drive us to adblock. If your site needs ad revenue then make your ads good or expect to lose visitors. Make a site not work with adblock then you're making a site that won't show in my browser.
I redesigned and rebuilt the website of the company I forced to work about 2 years ago. First I basically turned the current theme of the site in to something mobile friendly using Foundation. A year later I designed the site from the ground up using foundation again.
About 20% of the users who visited our site used mobile pre-mobile friendliness. After the first incarnation it crept to 35%. Then after the total redesign it surpassed desktop usage at about 55%.
The site in question is just an information portal for the company/charity I work for. It doesn't do commerce, but I noted that more people used mobiles to view the site once they knew it was designed for the device. I would argue that the small businesses would benefit from it.
Just for clarification - I do not work for Google. Or get paid by Google.
Don't flatter yourself. The increased visits from mobile devices may simply mean that more individuals own mobile devices, not that your redesign was driving adoption of mobile devices or visitors setting aside their desktop computers and reaching for their mobile device just so they could visit your "mobile-friendly" site.
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