Awesome! This page is mobile friendly
April 21 has been the day that Google started to penalise a website’s rankings if they didn’t get mobile friendly. If your site doesn’t work well on a mobile phone, well, your ranking is going to be severely downgraded.
Finally, I’ve managed to work out how to deal with those big slide shows on my tramping.net.nz site. At least the process has been started, there’s still a few of the more complicated pages to deal with but it should be finished soonish. One of my sections has 16 sub-sections which requires a complicated set of conditionals to get a relevant image thrown up where it’s needed. Plenty of neurone action required, let me tell you. And there’s still the odd inconsistency to sort out but I’m 95% of the way there.
This should help maintain my excellent Google page ratings, there’s plenty of websites in the tramping field that require a complete rewrite to make them mobile friendly. Many of my pages are listed are right under the Department of Conservation listings, at number two on the front page. Not so bad after just a year’s effort. DOC has, of course, just completely revamped their own website and it’s greatly more useable now, although the level of helpful information typically ain’t exactly high.
It’s turned out that I have needed to do a full tidy up of the CSS file so there has been more effort expended than I had anticipated. I’ve shuffled around and resized all the headings as well. The end result is that the site looks quite snappy on the phone, well, the phone emulator I have been using for my testing. Just have to do a similar level of work on the desktop site to match the mobile version.
Of course there’s this Bluelake website to similarly deal with, and then, cycle trails Australia. There may be long nights during winter here in Nelson but there’s always plenty to do.
I am using the website mobilephoneemulator.com to test the code, they give you a choice of a few different recent mobile phones, the iphone 4, 5 and 6 sizings might be enough to be generally applicable to any smart phone screen size. I hope that the emulation is true to an actual phone, it sure looks pretty.
In any case I have changed the status of my tramping New Zealand site when tested at the official Google testing website from a Big Fail when tested a few days ago to Awesome!