Most every webmaster that has availed themselves of the Google Webmaster Tools and more specifically Google Analytics will have received notifications along the following lines:
Google systems have tested 8 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 8 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.
What they mean of course is that your website will be shown at the bottom of a 100,000+ website listing — somewhere on search results page 425. Basically no one will see your site and you will be effectively removed from the internet. Yes, there will be connectivity that would theoretically allow people to access your website. But, practically speaking, your site will be in a locked filing cabinet stored in a disused lavatory in the basement with a broken stairs — and don’t forget about the lion.
I’m not complaining just stating the situation. We have about 60 core websites, that were created long before smartphones existed — a world in which everyone viewed your website from a desktop computer.
Now the world is different and we have 60 websites to transform into mobile friendly sites or they will disappear. That’s a fair bit of work. But, something which must be done. Actually, it has been something which should have been down last year or even the year before. But, you know how things go when living in the time of putting out brush fires.
Well, google found a way to change the game so that making older websites mobile friendly has become the biggest brush fire in the lot.
So we are working on it. So far we’ve managed an average of one (or maybe two) websites a day. That is until we come up against one of the monster sites with 2000+ pages. Those take a bit longer. Why should it take longer? Because few of the sites are CMS. These are static pages — old school pages in which the page you see is actually stored somewhere as a text file rather than residing in bits and pieces in a database.
Four Phases of converting a website
I have divided this job into four phases:
- Mobile Friendly
- Mobile Pretty
- Mobile Effective
- Mobile Refined
Mobile Friendly
Basically this means the website will pass the google mobile friendly test. We are doing this by making the websites responsive. This means that in addition to be friendly to mobile phones, they should be friendly or friendly-ish to tablets, pads, etc.
Since this is the first phase and there are other phases following, you can guess that making the site mobile friendly does not necessarily mean it will be pretty, effective, or refined. That comes a little later. First we have to make sure our websites don’t drop off the face of the earth.
Mobile Pretty
This comes after mobile friendly. It is very possible to convert a website into “friendly” and still fall short of “pretty”. A mobile friendly site can’t be bone ugly. But it can be far from pretty.
The next phase will be mobile effective. A large part of the work required for a site to become mobile effective is done during the mobile pretty phase.
Mobile pretty is not just the superficial look of the website. Pretty also entails approachability, usability, etc. This is an important phase. But one that for us will follow after we have accomplished mobile friendly for all the important websites.
Mobile Effective
This phrase involves a deeper look into the flow and dynamics of the website. Questions such as content quantity and choices of content will come into play. It is risky business to assume that people viewing on a mobile device are engaged in the same fashion as a desktop viewer. Taking this a little further, it is risky to your business to assume that people in general (independent of device) are engaged in the same fashion today as they may have been a few years ago.
Mobile Refined
This is a mythological phase they may only happen for a few of the more important sites. Given the three phases that need to occur prior to this, I suspect we are looking at a year of two down the line before this phase becomes a practicality.
So what is the next step?
We are in it. We are converting the html and css for our 60 core websites so that they follow the principles of RWD (responsive website design). That means they will form fit to be “friendly” on whatever device they are viewed. This is accomplished by putting in styling instructions that change based on the maximum width of the screen.
I’ve you’d like to help let us know.