This site is mobile responsive now and so is its sister site www.technical-writer.co.nz.
We made the upgrades in response to Google advising that mobile friendly sites would benefit from changes to its search algorithms released yesterday. If your site is not mobile responsive, it will still rank the same in desktop and laptop searches, but will suffer when people search from mobile devices.
The number of mobile searches is increasing greatly day-by-day as more people use their phones and iPads (and other tablets) to search the web. I think business would be short-sighted to not take advantage of that.
Google has put out some FAQs around their changes and what it all means.
We only just made it in time for Google’s 21 April deadline and we were able to do it with little fuss.
How we went mobile responsive
How? We used a website framework that came out of the box with plug-and-play, mobile responsive functionality.
Our web guys, Little Rocket, super-helpfully got the work done in an afternoon and got us underway.
A minor downside is that our new sites look a bit more generic now. They’re clean, professional and easy-to-read but they have lost the uniqueness that I enjoyed a lot on our previous sites, also made by Little Rocket.
Why did this happen? Well, in order to make it quick and easy to comply with Google’s mobile responsiveness requirements we used, as mentioned, a complying web framework, rather than build from the site from ground up.
And being a framework it does things a certain way, and lots of other people also use it so their sites have a similar feel.
But we can not recommend it enough!
WordPress saved the day!
The framework is called WordPress.
If we wanted, we could get Little Rocket to make our sites look more unique inside WordPress, but we are happy with the clean new look and the fact that it was so very quick to get it up and running.
I’m a bit of a layman evangelist for WordPress. Everyone should use it!
It’s open source software that these days powers a large proportion of the world’s websites. It’s here to stay, and its functionality, flexibility and ease-of-use is immense.
For non-techies, it’s big advantage is that it is a CMS, meaning you can make changes to the content on your site with practically no technical knowledge. Gain even just a little bit of technical knowledge and you can do big things with it.
Go mobile
What-ever you choose, WordPress or some other web technology, the future really is mobile, and your site needs to be easily visible in mobile searches. The number of mobile searches is calculated to surpass those of desktop searches some time this year.
Some people argue the changes are designed only to help Google’s own business, but, whatever, it’s the future and you need to be there!
Leave a Reply