Our admin team (i.e. me) has been working tirelessly day and night for months (more like half an hour) to convert our website from an already mobile-responsive design to a mobile-responsive design. What? You heard it.
It so happens that the Gods of Search Engines (Google) decided that they will implement a new indexing algorithm based on mobility. What this means is that websites will now also be ranked in terms of friendliness to mobile devices. As such and considering that mobile is the new wave, there is nothing wrong with it…except when Google screws-up royally. Then we have a big problem.
Google conveniently provides a tool to sort-of browse over sites to determine how will Google bot see them. When we ran our site through the tool this is the result we got:
Which is weird to say the least, because it so happens that our website is based on the latest Joomla and on a modified version of the Protostar template, which are, both, mobile ready!!!
As a matter of fact, when we run our site through many emulators (some of them very, very sophisticated) they all present the website in a mobile-user friendly format. For example:
But OK. If Google wants even more mobile-friendliness, Google gets more mobile-friendliness. And so we implemented a Joomla Plugin called BlackRed Flatlia Mobile. This is a free and open source plugin which detects mobile devices and switches to a mobile template. We again ran all kinds of tests against the website and it passed with flying colors. Every time displayed OK on mobile devices, although it is not optimized in terms of size. Yes, our main page is huuuuuge. So what? That's the way we want it. The point is that it loads a user-friendly webpage in mobile devices. It is fully readable and comprehensible. Another example but this time with the plugin ON:
See? No difference. It was already pre-optimized for mobile.
And so we ran Google's Mobile Tool yet again, and got the exact same result yet again.
Basically, Google's Mobile Tool is garbage. That's not the issue; the issue is that Google plans to use the view and analysis this tool provides to "judge" websites. Well, screw Google!!! We won't be getting the coveted mobile-friendly icon in Google Search. So what? Enough is enough. We are happy with the results. Our readers are happy with the results. That's all that counts. Could our website be more mobile-friendly? Sure. Do we have the time to fix it? No.
And so, dear reader, please feel free to enjoy our website in glorious (albeit not optimized) mobile version. Same as before, but now not any better.
Oh, we almost forgot. For good measure we added a switch to the main menu to change from the "Mobile" to the "Desktop" template manually. Although if you use it from a desktop, you won't notice any difference. But if you use it from a mobile device, you will probably not notice any difference either!
Enjoy!
The Admin @F&P
