Any other club webmasters had the warning email from Google about "mobile usability"?
(see http://searchengineland.com/google-sending-mobile-usability-warnings-huge-number-webmasters-213113 and many more).
Our site fails on most pages for a variety of reasons; small fonts, viewport (whatever that is) and "touch areas too close".
Do people feel it's important for a club's website to be easily accessible on a mobile device?
I don't have any problem using ours on a phone with a 4.5" screen,but the suggestion is that Google will drop you in their search rankings if you don't meet their standards.
Are any club websites particularly mobile-friendly so I can compare with ours?
edit:
Every page on our site passes Google's "mobile friendly" test at https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ but fails the "usability" one. Very confusing ...
Google's "mobile usability" warning
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
From all the publicity I've been doing, around half of the people looking at our event details do so via a mobile device. That data comes from Facebook and our Mailchimp email database. So it's reasonable to assume a decent proportion will look at club websites via a mobile, so it's probably pretty important to have a mobile friendly website.
Ours comes out as not mobile friendly either, which is odd as I can view it fine on my mobile. I tried SLOW too, and that passes the google mobile test!
Ours comes out as not mobile friendly either, which is odd as I can view it fine on my mobile. I tried SLOW too, and that passes the google mobile test!
- MikeShires
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
I'm told by the younger people who know about these things that the SLOW site was designed to be mobile friendly
- The Loofa
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Screenshots of the TVOC and SLOW websites from my phone are attached for comparison. While the TVOC website is usable by zooming in and scrolling around (like many websites that don't have a mobile version), the SLOW site is infinitely better for mobile use. You have to scroll down to see all the information, but it's all easy to read and click without zooming and therefore you retain overall visibility of the site layout.
- Steve
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
I've been saying how important it is for your site to be device agnostic for a couple of years or more. It's not just mobile phones, there are tablets of every size, games consoles, e-book readers etc.
It would be irresponsible to build a website today that wasn't responsive to the screen size it was being viewed on.
The downside of this is that building websites has gotten much harder recently. There are so many variations of browser on all these devices and many have differing abilities to interpret so of the newer/clever/flashy effects. So more time is needed to keep up to date with the latest techniques & best practice. Sites also need to be updated more frequently as things change so often and new devices come out.
If you want to see examples of responsive sites and how things like navigation need to adapt to screen size have a look at any of my more recent sites. Just grab the side of your browser window and make it narrower to see the changes. Then try the same on the BOF site, which needs the browser window to be at least 1200px wide. Just don't do it on my site though, too busy building other sites to update my own, It's coming soon though.
It would be irresponsible to build a website today that wasn't responsive to the screen size it was being viewed on.
The downside of this is that building websites has gotten much harder recently. There are so many variations of browser on all these devices and many have differing abilities to interpret so of the newer/clever/flashy effects. So more time is needed to keep up to date with the latest techniques & best practice. Sites also need to be updated more frequently as things change so often and new devices come out.
If you want to see examples of responsive sites and how things like navigation need to adapt to screen size have a look at any of my more recent sites. Just grab the side of your browser window and make it narrower to see the changes. Then try the same on the BOF site, which needs the browser window to be at least 1200px wide. Just don't do it on my site though, too busy building other sites to update my own, It's coming soon though.
- Paul Frost
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Paul is also behind my own company website and I can confirm he takes this issue very seriously!! It does make a big difference when you view on a smartphone vs a non-mobile friendly site.
http://www.enterpriseoh.com/
http://www.enterpriseoh.com/
Orienteering - its no walk in the park
- andypat
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
I set up our website (Border Liners) using Joomla 3 and as far as I can tell it's mobile friendly - it certainly looks ok on my own mobile, and on a tablet, and I haven't had any warnings. Yet.... !
- usuallylast
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
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. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
- Paul Frost
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Unfortunately my club's website is unusable on a mobile device, as it has no horizontal scroll or zoom, and so a lot of useful event info is permanently off the screen, with no way of getting it back on screen
That said, there are a lot of general websites out there where the so called 'mobile friendly' version, whilst looking nice on a mobile device, has removed so much of the useful functionality that it is equally unusable. Not so bad if you have the option to force it to go to the desktop site, but I really hate those sites where the site has been written such that it determines you are on a mobile device and then forces you to 'use' the mobile site.
That said, there are a lot of general websites out there where the so called 'mobile friendly' version, whilst looking nice on a mobile device, has removed so much of the useful functionality that it is equally unusable. Not so bad if you have the option to force it to go to the desktop site, but I really hate those sites where the site has been written such that it determines you are on a mobile device and then forces you to 'use' the mobile site.
- Knee Deep Mud!
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Knee Deep Mud! wrote:but I really hate those sites where the site has been written such that it determines you are on a mobile device and then forces you to 'use' the mobile site.
The key part of this is that there should not be a "mobile" site or a "desktop" site, there should just be A site that adjusts to fit the content into the available space.
Unfortunately some website builders don't "get it" and assume that people on smaller screens don't want all the content, or don't know how to re-arrange the presentation.
Content creators also need to adjust to the new flexible/responsive nature of web pages and stop using tables to present info whenever possible. Tables are very rigid & inflexible so can't reflow like normal text. There are some things that need a table, like results, but many others can be reformatted into headings and paragraphs rather than rows & columns.
If you have to use a table then you can set up the page to allow sideways scrolling on smaller screens. Check out the WOC2015 Programme to see what I mean. As the screen narrows past a certain point a scrollbar should become visible.
- Paul Frost
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Check out the WOC2015 Programme to see what I mean. As the screen narrows past a certain point a scrollbar should become visible.
Is this supposed to happen on a desktop / laptop - because it doesn't for me! There is a vertical scroll bar, but no horizontal one, for either the whole page or the table.
- Snail
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
You will only see the horizontal scroll bar below the table if the screen width is narrower than the table contents, in this case about 450 pixels.
- Paul Frost
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Re: Google's "mobile usability" warning
Knee Deep Mud! wrote:Unfortunately my club's website is unusable on a mobile device, as it has no horizontal scroll or zoom, and so a lot of useful event info is permanently off the screen, with no way of getting it back on screen
Really? Looks fine on my Samsung Galaxy, picture at the top then Upcoming events, Recent results, Orienteering news and some other content below. You seem to be able to get the rest of the content (newsletters etc.) by clicking the button on the RH end of the header, although there's nothing to lead you to try this. Horizontal scrolling works for me on the event pages, too.
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