Google to Penalize Sites that aren’t Mobile-Friendly April 21st – BlogPaws Designer Roll Call

[Kimberly Gauthier]

My designer told me about this over the weekend. I switched to a mobile friendly site last year and my new design will also be mobile friendly. If you need help updating your site (and it can be as easy as adding code or using a plugin for some bloggers), check with the designers in the BlogPaws community.
The algorithm change will impact searches made from smartphones. You can check Google Analytics to see what percentages of your organic traffic comes from smartphones.

Blog post: http://socialmediajustforwriters.com/3-things-authors-must-know-about-mobile-friendly-websites/

If you’re a designer who can help bloggers update their site in anticipation of Google’s upcoming algorithm change, please put your contact information in the comments so that bloggers can contact you.

[Carleen Pruess Coulter]

For a couple of my sites that are not responsive and have quirks that keep me from easily switching them to a responsive theme, I added the WP Touch Pro plugin to make them mobile. It is a decent enough quick fix for anyone who needs more time for a redesign or who is happy enough with the themes the plugin uses. I don’t recall if they have a free version (I think they do), but the pro version wasn’t too terribly expensive.

 

[Gina]

Blogs using the Blogger platform just need to go to Template – Mobile – click on the gear and choose “Yes” to enable the default mobile template.  Once they do that, they can also customize the mobile template to show more widgets, etc.

[Cathy Bendzunas]

If you don’t know if your site is mobile friendly or not, you can check here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

[Jeanne]

Thank you Kimberly and Gina! I appreciate the heads up!!

[Nicholas Podrasky]

I’m not a designer, but will happily recommend the designer/developer we hired for switching us up to a fully mobile-responsive WP theme. He’s here in the Denver/Boulder area and I’ve worked with him for over ten years now. Is that okay to post here?

[Nicholas Podrasky]

Great. Without hesitation I can recommend Trevor Masinelli and The Zen Orange. http://thezenorange.com/. You can visit his site to see a sample of his portfolio. For us, not only did he update our blog but added full e-commerce functionality. The best part about working with Trevor is I can simply say what it is I need the site to do without using any technical jargon and he just ‘gets it’, and then handles all the technical stuff. He’s also a hell of a designer.

If anyone would like to talk to us first, or would like a friendly introduction, please don’t hesitate to ask. We’re happy to help.

-nap

[Summer]

Thank you for this post. I had no idea this was going to happen, and luckily, I managed to check that my blog was mobile friendly. Thank you also to Oz; I checked my Blogger blog using the method you suggested. And thank you Cathy; I checked my website using this. My blog was already mobile friendly, so I can breathe easy. Once again thank you for this information, and I hope everyone can get their sites sorted in time.

[Christina Fabrizio]

Thank you Kimberly for sharing this information!!

[Christina Fabrizio]

Thanks Cathy! This was very helpful!
 
Cathy Bendzunas said:

If you don’t know if your site is mobile friendly or not, you can check here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

[Singing Dogs]

People should follow the Google webmaster blog to stay updated. I tell this to all clients I work with.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/?m=1

[Lorie Lewis Ham]

I saw an article in Website Magazine early this month about it, so we are now working on heading that way. Great to know about the Blogger thing–we have a sister site on them.

The gal helping with our website says that our WordPress theme has a mobile friendly skin we can purchase so we are checking into that.

[Author]

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