• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

nSiteful Web Builders

Building a Better Web - One Site at a Time.

  • Home
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Resources
  • Web Sites
  • Online Marketing
  • WordPress Support
    • Customized WordPress Training
    • 60-for-60 Sessions
  • Web Applications
  • Blog
    • Archive Listing Minimalistic
    • Blog Articles Grouped by Category
    • Case Studies
    • General
    • Portfolio
    • Reviews
    • Snippets
    • Techniques
  • Contact Jeff
    • Purchase Retainer Consulting Hours
    • About Retainer Consulting Hours
Screen shot of mobile search in Google

By Jeff Cohan, July 23, 2015

Side Effects of Rebuilding Web Sites to be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

Screen shot of mobile search in GoogleWhat drives many to rebuild their existing Web sites to be responsive and mobile-friendly are justifiable concerns about user experience and search engine placement. After all, the need to make Web pages look and act right on small mobile devices has only intensified as more and more people spend proportionately more of their Internet time on those devices. And then there’s Google, who, on April 21, 2015, implemented their much-heralded new search algorithm they referred to as the “mobile-friendly update“. From that day forward, Google started boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Which means, of course, that your non-mobile-friendly Web pages that used to rank high won’t any more.

Yet it is a side effect of the process of rebuilding Web sites to be responsive and mobile-friendly that may turn out to be the best reason of all to undertake it.

Concentrating on What’s Most Important

Namely, planning a Web site with a focus on the constraints and limitations of small devices forces us to concentrate on what’s most important. Knowing that our mobile visitors will grow weary of scrolling down and down and down to get to what matters to them (or that the light will eventually turn green), we’re wise to remove, or at least reorganize or streamline, content and functionality that is of secondary importance (or worse). We might rewrite paragraphs to be more concise. We might remove some eye candy images that add little or no value. And we might be inclined (finally!) to ditch those overlong “Mission Statements” on our About pages that no one ever reads anyway, even on their desktop computers.

(Re-)Entering Planning Mode

The process of making a Web site responsive and mobile-friendly plunges us back into planning mode. It invites us to think, once again, in terms of audiences and outcomes. And this is a good thing. This rebuilding process is an opportunity to redefine — even reinvent — ourselves and our messages. We start asking ourselves tough questions we may never have asked before (although we should have), when space wasn’t a factor; when publishing something was better than publishing nothing (i.e., when more was more); and when we assumed (always wrongly) that visitors would read each of our Web pages from top to bottom, left to right.

Even for Web-site owners who blog regularly, it’s common to leave the static content alone. Which is to say that it’s common to let significant parts of our Web sites just be, for years at a time.

But life and business evolve. That spinoff service offering about which you were so hopeful five years ago may not have yielded a single sale in the past twenty-four months. Does it still merit a place on your Web site? Or is it just a distraction, another potential exit page? By the same token, another of your offerings, once a little dinghy hidden on page six, may have matured into your flagship. Shouldn’t it be presented front and center now?

In The Words of a Client

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a particular client (I will call him “Steve”) for going on two decades. His Web site is a custom-built PHP/MySQL site with some custom-built CMS modules.

The working relationship is unique in that Steve and I co-develop his site, and I try to help him be as self-sufficient as he wants to be. Steve is way better at HTML than a guy with a very demanding day job totally unrelated to Web development (more than one, actually) has a right to be. But Steve has always been a Do-It-Yourself-er, and his original Web site was one he built and maintained himself. When he hired me on, it was with the understanding that he would still have the ability to maintain content. Keep in mind that this was before WordPress.

Over the years, the site has undergone a number of changes, both in content and infrastructure, and Steve and I have invented and implemented many low-tech collaboration and version control methodologies that have served us well. (Some, if we do say so ourselves, are downright nifty. One of these days we may follow through on our oft-expressed intention of writing blog articles describing them. We might choose to omit any references to times when Steve touched files he wasn’t supposed to.)

A few months ago, Steve asked if we could start rebuilding his site to be responsive and mobile-friendly, and we’ve been working on it since. Here’s what Steve wrote me yesterday:

This project comes with a bonus. In the course of doing things to make sure that the mobile-responsive site looks and works well, I’m finding lots of opportunities to make improvements that have nothing to do with mobile-responsiveness.

Well said, Steve!

Conclusion

Screen shot of mobile search in GoogleThe jury is still out as to whether what Google so innocently coined its “mobile-friendly update” will ever lead to the “Mobilegeddon” some feared and forecasted. The good news from my perspective as a mobile Web surfer is that it’s easier for me to find Web pages of interest that are readable without having to tap and zoom and squint (note the “Mobile-friendly” phrases in the screen capture at right). The good news from my perspective as a builder of Web sites is that Web-site owners are giving renewed attention to the user experience and to the effectiveness of their Web properties in communicating their value propositions.

Postscript: Resources

Here are some resources alluded to in the above article.

  • Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Rolling out the mobile-friendly update
  • Google Mobile-Friendly Test Page
  • Organizing Mobile
    Excerpt from Chapter 4 of Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

Related Posts

  1. How to Create Tooltips with CSS (Only)
  2. 14 days exploring Pinterest, Day #3
  3. Bring your Facebook Fan Page to your Web site
  4. Case Study: Emergency Notice Banner for Hybrid Web site
  5. How to use Advanced Custom Fields with Genesis
  • Choose the best match.

Written by Jeff Cohan · Categorized: General · Tagged: Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Web Design, SEO, Strategic Planning

  • Choose the best match.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

mailchimp signup

Subscribe to get notified when new articles are published. Unsubscribe any time. No spam. I promise. Check out my newsletter archives.

social

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

Recent Articles

  • Use Case for Custom Post Type: “In The News” March 10, 2023
  • Create a Custom Shortcode to Display a MemberPress Membership Price ANYWHERE on Your Website February 5, 2023
  • Avoid Direct Styling; Use CSS Instead September 21, 2022
  • Blog Tags: What They Are (and What They’re Not) August 5, 2022
  • How to Create a Simple Custom Events Plugin May 24, 2022

Filter By Category/Tag

Categories

  • Case Studies (7)
  • General (61)
  • Portfolio (5)
  • Reviews (12)
  • Snippets (16)
  • Techniques (38)

Popular Tags

Advanced Custom Fields Blogging Child Themes Content Marketing CSS CSS Grid Customer Service Custom Fields Custom Post Types Diagnostics Facebook FooGallery Genesis Gutenberg HTML Images iPhone Libra Live Chat Marketing Media MemberPress MemberPress Courses mu-plugins MySQL Photo Gallery php Pinterest Plugins Post Formats Pricing Project Management Security SEO Seth Godin Shortcodes Social Networking Surveys Taxonomies Trello Twitter Video Web design Web forms WordPress

siteground wp hosting

Web Hosting

wp101

EasyWordPresstutorialvideosforbeginners.
MemberPress CTA

Footer

Background

Web Sites | WordPress Support | Web Applications.

Formally trained in liberal arts and education (I have a B.A. in Government from Harvard and studied Secondary Education at Rutgers Graduate School), I have honed my skills in the communication arts and sciences as a teacher, trainer, instructional designer, writer, photographer, calligrapher, helpdesk manager, database programmer, and multimedia developer.

(I've also been a group counselor, waiter, bartender, bicycle messenger boy, computer salesman, carpenter's helper, financial analyst, and school board president.)

Tech

Systems since 1983.
Web sites since 1994.
PHP since 2001.
WordPress since 2007.

Contact

770-772-5134
Email Jeff
Send Money
All Ways

Copyright 2023, nSiteful Web Builders, Inc.

 

Subscribe

Pardon the interruption. I know popups can be annoying. But I’d love to have you as a subscriber.

Sign up to be notified when new articles are published. Unsubscribe any time.

* indicates required

Powered by MailChimp

×