Responsive design and fooey!


2015/03/11

If you've been here before, you may have noticed that there's a big change in "look and feel" as of today. It wasn't my idea; I was happy as things were, but Google has been nagging me for months about "mobile usability" issues. In plain language, they didn't like the way this site performed on phones and tablets.

Google systems have tested 1,480 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 1,480 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

"Critical" and "ranked appropriately" are the nasty little words that finally made me do something about it. So, today I changed some 4,000 pages to be "responsive" - that is, to flow differently when accessed by different devices (see Screenfly to see this page as it looks on various devices).

Honestly, this ticks me off. In my view, it should be up to the browser on the device to take care of 90% of these issues. But that's not how the rest of the world sees it, so if I want Google traffic, I have to comply.

Have I fixed it to Google's satisfaction? I have no clue. I'll have to wait weeks or months to see if they keep sending me nasty-grams. In the meantime, I know that my hasty rewrite missed some pages completely and broke some others. I'll work on those issues at my leisure and probably be able to finish up sometime in the coming decade.



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© Anthony Lawrence







Wed Mar 11 19:49:38 2015: 12619   TonyLawrence

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Thanks to some folks at G+ who told me about (link)

I also found (link)

Between these two I should catch most remaining issues.



Sat Mar 21 09:29:38 2015: 12628   TonyLawrence

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Well, a LOT of this is done. Still a few screwups here and there, but I'm mostly there. A lot of work.

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