How does your website look on a phone?
JAQUO article seen on an iPhone.
Are you reading this using your phone? If so, you know how great it looks and works.
If you’re using a computer, then the image on the right will demonstrate to you how great it looks and how easy it is to use.
Smartphones seem to have been with us forever now. I’d love to give you statistics about how many people are now using them, but by the time I get to the end of this sentence, the information would be out of date. More and more people are becoming smartphone users every minute of the day.
Phone & tablets
We also have to consider the people who are browsing our websites using tablets of various sorts,iPads, Kindles and the like.
Like smartphones, these devices have been around for a long time now and it’s quite some time ago that Google make allowances for this.
If you were searching using a phone, the Google would only return search engine results from sites that were phone-ready.
In mid-February, 2015, Google announced that it would be taking cellphone compatibility into consideration even more. Indeed, they announced that it would have a significant effect on search engine results.
When Google uses a word like ‘significantly’ then it should make us all sit up and take notice if we have websites or write for the web.
What makes a site phone-friendly?
How does the site looks immediately a cellphone user arrives there? Of course, navigation is terribly important – a site has to work, after all – but the viewer will know within a second whether a site is worth staying on or whether to click back.
The site needs to be readable without the user making any adjustments. They should not have to enlarge the text or scroll sideways.Ideally, they should be able to keep the phone in a vertical format without having to change the orientation to horizontal.
Ease of use
So fonts should be larger than we were accustomed to seeing on the web in the earlier part of the century. Users don’t want to see huge swathes of text, either. They go to a site for information and they want it quickly. Copy should be broken up into small paragraphs (smaller than makes sense grammatically) and be split up using sub-headers.
Users should be able to quickly scan articles. With some sites getting over half their hits from users who are not using a computer, this is becoming more and more critical. Every day,countless people are trading in their old cellphones. And they’re not replacing them with the old-fashioned type,they are going for smartphones.
Today, a phone is your computer, the only difference being that it is one you can carry in the pocket of your jeans wherever you go.
When Google announced these measures that will have a ‘significant impact’ on searches, the company kindly gave webmasters two months to get their sites ready. Luckily, at JAQUO, we don’t need the time – we were prepared 🙂
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