Google changed its site ranking, if a site is not mobile friendly it will now be heavily penalized. I was quite fond of my old design but when running the Google Mobile test it failed miserably. Hence a hasty redesign based on a newer WordPress theme was in order.
I can relate – guess what I am doing right now 🙂 My WP blogs were fine but my home-grown websites were not. Yesterday I learned more than I ever wanted to know about developing responsive websites, and to my surprise I managed to update one site already.
But I have spotted “famous” sites that are not mobile-friendly yet according to Google’s definition – even though they have obviously been optimized already for displaying the content pane just fine when turning the device by 90° and scrolling to the right… something the Google bot will not do.
Although I finally got addicted to playing with elements floating and jumping at certain screen widths and found it quite enjoyable the annoying thing is that you just do it for Google, not for the users.
Irritating isn’t it? On one hand I guess it’s a good thing that Google tries to ensure that all content can be accessed with decent quality by mobile devices, on the other hand this illustrates the enormous dominance they have over the Web. (Anyhow, at least they are not turning the Web into a gilded cage à la Facebook).