06 May 2015

Is Your FHS Website Mobile Friendly?

Google, which processes 100 billion search requests each month, just announced that more searches are now being made on mobile devices than on personal computers in the U.S. and many other parts of the world. How mobile-friendly is your society website?
A quick survey of the major genealogy and family history society websites across Canada showed only three that were formatted for mobile: British Columbia, Alberta and Prince Edward Island. The others, while usable, had multi-column formatting meaning characters too small to easily read and menus too small for stubby fingers.
Canadian societies are not alone. While I didn't try them all none of the major societies I tested in the US and UK, with the notable exception of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, had mobile-friendly websites.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Google provide an online test for whether (or not) a site is mobile friendly:

Rick Roberts said...

Google changed their search algorithm on April 21. When a Google search is done on a mobile device now, any site that is not optimized for use on a mobile device is penalized in the search result -- the non-optimized site appears further down the list of results. Searches on personal computers using Google are not affected at this time.

We are building a new GlobalGenealogy.ca website that is optimized for all platforms. Much more work to do before it is ready for prime-time.

Alona @ GouldGenealogy said...

Just for reference, here's the link for people to test their website and/or blog for Mobile-Friendliness https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/