Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

Thanks so much for this warning Rawtop, i just lit a fire under my designer to get moving

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

FYI this might be useful if you want to test your sites:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

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

As a (temporarily) solution you could use Jetpack’s “Mobile Theme” which creates a simple mobile version of your Wordpress site.

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

Thank you RT.

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

[QUOTE=GayDemon;157096]FYI this might be useful if you want to test your sites:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/[/QUOTE]

Excellent link Bjorn!

Great for testing!

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 like…

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.

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 9.20.11 AM.jpg

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 – even though Google likes it. I mean this is not a good mobile experience…

The text totally gets in the way of the image that people are there to see…

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 9.42.14 AM.jpg

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

Actually Google has be proactive about this sending out notices to website owners that are using their webmaster tools.

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

That is the plug-in I use (WPtouch Mobile Plugin)

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/

It automatically enables a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress website.

I tested my sites on the URL Bjorn suggested, and it rates my sites as perfect!

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.

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

I switched a couple of sites I got over to a responsive design a few months ago. Mobile se traffic went up dramatically on one of them. Pre responsive template mobile constituted maybe 30% of my total traffic on this particular site, its now around 60%. Looks great on my analytics but is it me or is this traffic basically shit? That and going “responsive” I quickly realized all those iframes I used for dating and cams that actually did make money must now be sacrificed. Yay! And before the program reps start slamming their cocks on their keyboards, I’ve tried all your mobile sites, put your dicks back in your pants.

I understand mobile is only going to increase so for now I just sit back and watch my mobile traffic grow, pad my analytics, and hope a better way to monetize it comes along.

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

I couldn’t agree more… Who in the their right mind is going to pay for porn on a tiny cell phone??? Even if you have one of those big ass Samsung phones you still can’t see shit worth jacking off too…

Now tablet traffic, that I can see converting.

Can you go back through your stats and see which type of traffic increased the most (cell vs tablet)? I’m wondering if Google considers them both mobile even though tablets don’t need a scaled down site seeing as the majority of them have the same resolution as desktops.

Thanks,
Kevin.

Re: Make your site mobile friendly before April 21

[QUOTE=mountequinox;157315]I couldn’t agree more… Who in the their right mind is going to pay for porn on a tiny cell phone??? Even if you have one of those big ass Samsung phones you still can’t see shit worth jacking off too…

Now tablet traffic, that I can see converting.

Can you go back through your stats and see which type of traffic increased the most (cell vs tablet)? I’m wondering if Google considers them both mobile even though tablets don’t need a scaled down site seeing as the majority of them have the same resolution as desktops.

Thanks,
Kevin.[/QUOTE]

Slight increase in tablets, mostly phones.