Mobile Friendly Website Ideas for IF, Please!

So, I’m told by my web provider that Google will be giving priority in its web searches to sites that are mobile-optimised. My current website, jjguest.com, hosts not only my IF games but my motion graphics portfolio, which is my career. I built it from scratch in HTML and CSS, and it’s not mobile-optimised.

I’m thinking that because of the diversity of the content, I should split the two strands into separate domains, using something like Squarespace for the motion graphics stuff, because it’s primarily visual, and something else for the IF, which is all wordy. It might also be a bit more ‘professional’ to keep career and hobbies separate. Until I can make IF my career, of course :slight_smile:

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the splitting-off idea, and if you have any suggestions for a format or template to showcase the IF, I’d like to hear that too.

Thanks,

J. J. Guest

Split it off!

Oh you want my reasoning too?

If you try to do best of both worlds you’ll mess up either mobile or desktop version - potentially both.

Do each as best as you can without giving on to anything because “it works better for the other version” - no compromises!

If it’s your portfolio, give each viewer a professional look depending on their device. It’ll work in your favor, no?

Wix is great, easy to use, and does a lot for free. It also automatically formats sites for mobile and lets you tweak elements in monitor vs mobile easily. You can check my site http://hanonondricek.wix.com/pyramidif

I know nothing of web design to qualify the attempt.

I don’t know how they would be determining which websites are not mobile friendly, but Bootstrap is a very nice framework for responsive design (ie, it will automatically adjust the number of columns etc for the width of the screen.)

First, use Google’s analysis tool to see what Google think of your site as is:

google.com.au/webmasters/to … -friendly/

It will probably tell you most or all of the obvious points of code or content that vex it re: mobiles, if any.

Then, proceed to follow the points given by the tool, AND/OR! - read their docs, linked from the same page.

If it’s too hard to follow the points yourself, it is a good solution these days to use a commercial or third-party responsive template, like Dannii mentioned. There are tons available now.

Google’s main point is that they favour you using the same HTML to deliver all your content to any device, but point 2 is that when that is not optimal, they are fine with you delivering the same content in different versions for, say, desktop users and mobile users (the 2 versions of your site idea.)

On the topic of dividing content for professionalism, you can keep that decision in the realm of the personal. What I mean is, don’t worry that mixing personal and professional content on one site will have a rating effect. Beyond the tech automation, Google also has human page evaluators raters running around (I know because I was one for half a year. Weird job and crummy pay - I would no recommend it). The evaluators are trained to rate to page purpose. If the purpose of your page is clearly to share information about yourself and your work, and it does both effectively, it will be viewed favourably.

Pages with unclear purpose are not viewed favourably. As a rater, my least favourite pages were anything on Tumblr. Oh, how I hated sitting there trying to work out what this random spray of contextless linked crap was about!

-Wade