While Google says they are going to penalize sites for not being mobile
friendly, I would not worry too much about it. The penalty would be that
your site is not included in the top percentile of search hits. The
information that would be searched is probably not found on many other
sites so will most likely rise to the top anyways. The sites that are
going to suffer from this are commercial sites who actually will lose
money of they can't be found easily. The real question is how many
people actually do genealogy on their phone or mobile device? Larger
mobile devices like I-Pads, tablets and the like will not suffer at all.
The ones that will have a hard time are the smart phones and to make
your site compatible would mean increasing your font size dramatically
and as Sheila said, offer smaller image sizes that work on the smaller
devices.
On the programming side it is possible to make your pages act
differently depending on what type of device is seeing them but the code
involved is pretty complex and most GenWeb coordinators are not capable
of that level of coding. Perhaps there are some programs that can
prepare your site for different devices but for those of use who do
their own coding we have to weigh the complexity and learning curve to
make it happen against what is a fairly benign threat by Google for
genealogy web sites.
While Google is a major search engine it is not the only one and the
others are not saying they are going to penalize anyone.
If you are worried your site is going to suffer, post a message on your
main page asking people to contact you if they are using a mobile device
and are having a hard time navigating your site or finding information.
If you are getting lots of messages to this effect then consider
learning how to change your site so it is mobile device friendly. If on
the other hand you receive just a couple or less, then I would not worry
about it.
If anyone out there has actually done the coding so that their genealogy
site is mobile friendly without changing the look of the site for
non-mobile devices I would be interested in hearing about the process.
Denny Shirer - drdx(a)neo.rr.com - Canton, OH
Shirer Family Genealogy -
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mysong
Muskingum County, OHGenWeb -
www.rootsweb.com/~ohmuskin/
Muskingum County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogy Society -
www.mccogs.org
On 4/22/2015 11:46 AM, Sheila Helser via wrote:
Assuming you want to do genealogy research on a cell phone or small
tablet..and do as one company tells you.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
You need big text, tiny pictures, and everything straight down the page.