Is there any specific html tag or meta tag that tells a web page is designed for mobile devices? I have created a mobile sitemap linking the mobile web pages, but I am afraid of search engines don't identify these webpages as mobile versions.
I Recommend using Media Queries in your CSS and focusing on developing your mobile website first if you're going to use this technique.
Basic Example
#media only screen and (min-width: 480px){
//insert styles SPEFIC to resolutions greater than 480px wide
}
Regarding the comment:
//default CSS
.hidden-for-mobile{ display: none;}
//overrides the hidden style, and displays your element in larger resolution browsers.
#media only screen and (min-width: 480px){
display: inline; //or block or whatever you want
}
there may very well be a different or better way to implement this, but the point is...
If you are trying to control the look/feel of your website, do your best to keep it in the stylesheets
pro tip: You will want to use em / % based widths to ensure your site responds to your users browsers properly
Check out a working example with HTML5 Boiler plate here.
And Media query browser support list here
Additionally, if you are concerned about tracking your user base, Google Analytics can do that for you. You can break down your traffic however you'd like.
No, there is not. You can use JavaScript to detect mobile browsers, and direct users to special mobile versions of your webpages, but there is nothing that says for a specific page this is for a mobile browser.
If you are concerned that you will be presenting duplicate content to Google, block the spidering of your mobile site via a robots.txt file, then ensure that mobile users are always redirected to the correct mobile site.
If you're concerned about styles and things then see How to setup HTML for mobile Devices with an header-image, that takes whole width of browser?
Else, if you don't want search engines linking to m.domain.com instead of domain.com (or whatever) then I'd think about doing some PHP header detection to redirect to the main site.
To ensure they're not crawled at all so will never show in search results, add
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Related
Responsive adsense ads are working fine on my responsive website but I would also like to add horizontal "ad links" to the website (to be shown only on desktop due to higher width).
So, what I want to do is place 728x15 ad link unit in the responsive site and make them visible only for large screens (read desktop). However, as per adsense policy, changing ads through media queries is allowed only in responsive ad units (through display: none) but there are no responsive ad for "ad links".
Any ideas how can I implement adsense "ad links" in a responsive website so these link ads are shown only on larger screens (say for min-width:800) without violating adsense policies.
Thanks.
As far I can see display:none method for not showing AdSense ad, does work with (asynchronous) link units and I think it does work for all asynchronous AdSense units. (For every AdSense snippet with adsbygoogle.js in script src.)
But, you are right: AdSense Help Center is not mentioning "asynchronous" and it explicitly says "Hiding ad units at anytime (e.g., display:none), unless you're implementing a responsive ad unit".
My wild guess is that might be because there are already #media queries in original responsive code (code you get from the AdSense dashboard), and the risk of error and the number of modifications are minimal:
removing inline style attribute from ins tag
updating "default" class declaration block in style tag ("first line")
applying display:none on ins tag via custom class (.adlinkunit1 in example below)
So this should work for you ("link ads are shown only on larger screens (say for min-width:800)":
<style type="text/css">
.adlinkunit1 { display:inline-block;width:728px;height:15px }
#media ( max-width: 800px) { .adlinkunit1 { display: none; } }
</style>
<ins class="adsbygoogle adlinkunit1"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-..."
data-ad-slot="..."></ins>
<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
(Please note max-width is used for display:none.)
Personally I think above example is not a violation of the AdSense policies, but also I'm not sure why Help Center says "responsive" and of course - what will happen if Google would ever decide (for some reason) to remove (undocumented) display:none support from non-responsive asynchronous units.
You could also try a "device detection" solution like WURFL cloud, which at the time of writing this costs $40p.m.
With that solution, you can get things like "IS_DESKTOP" and "IS_MOBILE" and "IS_TABLET".
From there you can really customise your ads to your different devices. For example, on the desktop you can display the 728x15 block, and on mobiles you can display something smaller like 200x90, meaning you're not missing out on possible mobile based revenue.
It also allows you to test different ad blocks on different devices really well... what works best on tablets? Is it 728x15 or 468x15. Or what about normal ad blocks (not ad links) on mobile devices, is it text only, or image, or both? Does an ads perform better in different positions on different devices?
You can get really granular with this approach in an easily maintainable way. If you have a decent amount of traffic to your website you shouldn't have a problem making more than an extra $40p.m in adsense revenue, mitigating the cost of using a service like WURFL cloud (and no, I am in no way affiliated with then, it's just a solution I use, partially based upon my desire to have an easily maintainable way to get really granular with my adsense on different devices).
Good luck.
A solution called WURFL.js allows you to leverage WURFL at no cost (community edition)
http://wurfl.io
The same framework with more WURFL properties and more features is available though the Business Edition of the same tool. To avoid doubt, I am affiliated with ScientiaMobile, the company that offers these tools.
Is there a way to use responsive design principles with Google Sites. Has anyone tried that. Could you direct me to a sample site. I looked at this google help topic but then that is supposedly about exclusively mobile sites.
My main focus is a normal website which is optimized for web rather than primarily a mobile site.
Alternatively would Blogger be a better option in this case as that allows to change CSS.
I think your negative impression is right. It doesn't implement the features you'd expect in responsive design.
The key to your question is that Google Sites don't use a viewport declaration (meta viewport in the head element). If you don't have that, then device browsers treat you as a legacy desktop-only website. They assume you'll break completely below ~830px, and set a page min-width accordingly. That doesn't sound much like responsive design to me.
Google Sites don't let you write your own CSS or HTML HEAD, so you can't implement a more responsive design yourself.
To be fair, you can choose to not set a fixed page width. Also navigations buttons will reflow on relatively narrow windows, if you're using the "horizontal navigation" feature. The latter isn't great design but at least it's degrading gracefully.
There is an option "Automatically adjust site to mobile phones" under Manage site -> General. However many people suggest it's better not to use it :). I tried enabling it on an old site, previewing the page, and selecting "preview in mobile". At least on Firefox on my original netbook (800px width), it was not responsive. It didn't expand to use the 800px screen properly.
As an aside, the line-wrapping (or absence of it) is a pre-existing issue with my site. You could blame this on me for not testing it :). However it illustrates a limitation of the WYSIWYG editor in Google Sites. It doesn't show, check for, or filter out the formatting that causes this problem.
Mobile yes, responsive no.
I was messing with Google Sites today and you can make a site mobile friendly (I had to come here to get started!). I just used the "Blank Template" to mess around with.
You do need to activate (like others that have mentioned):
Options (gear icon) > Manage site > (scroll down to Mobile) Check.. Automatically adjust for mobile phones. Yeah, let's bury that option way down at the bottom!
Considering the whole mobile "push" Google implemented in the spring of 2015 this should be ON by default for any newly created Google Site.
Just selecting that option makes an OK (basic) mobile site. Not a responsive site. So on my iPhone it does scale photos correctly to fit the device and switches the main horizontal menu to the "hamburger" icon/menu. But collapsing the desktop browser window does not produce responsive results.
https://sites.google.com/site/rwstws51/
As a test, I uploaded a way too large photo (2.5mb) to see what would happen. Running the site through Google PageSpeed Insights it did not display any "optimize photos" warning, so seems to serves up an optimized photo for phones and desktops.
I guess the basic theme is actually called "Ski." I tried out the "Legal Pad" theme and it was totally borked on mobile. I think due to the header and content area background images.
To me Google Sites is ideal if you are already heavy into Google's other products... drive, docs, Google+, webmastertools, analytics, etc... As it has links to add those types of items when editing. Or need a quick site for collaborating as you can easily set the site access like YouTube,Drive items.
Also, you are very limited as to what html you can added. Trying to add a script tag gets stripped out when attempting to save. So again depending on the use there are definitely other options out there.
The answer applying to old "Classic" google sites is NO.
If you create your own custom HTML forms with apps script, you can add the #media viewports etc to the css for those pages/forms,so that helps...
but the google site frame around overrides custom css attempting
responsive design at the page level.
now a days its possible to make a responsive Google Site. since Google has enhanced this feature "Automatically adjust site to mobile phones" option in the Manage Site option button.
to find the option- go to> Manage Site> General> , in the general settings page's lower portion you can see a radio button named "Automatically adjust site to mobile phones". Just tick the radio button & u have enhanced the feature.
Refer an example site made with responsive Google site www.jyotiprokashmusic.com
I have a fairly large dynamic website, whose user interface is written using XHTML, CSS and jQuery. The site does not display/work well on mobile devices. What is the best option: to develop a fluid site that displays well on both mobile and desktop, or to separately develop a mobile version of the site? Thank you for any suggestion.
Although a parallel site, with a desktop page and a mobile page is easier to build, it is harder to maintain (2 sets of content) and Google will see this as duplicate content - one of the sites won't rank in search engines.
A fluid solution, which displays the content well whatever the screen size (and if you use CSS & JavaScript wisely, it can look great on all sorts of screen sizes), is a much better solution, and you only have one URL for each page for your visitors to book mark.
I would like to add value to my website that I have developed at the moment so that user can check on their mobile phone.
My questions:
Should I make different template for mobile version and full version one?
Like creating mobile.example.com for mobile version?
Does Opera Mini not support JavaScript? I have a mobile phone that has Opera Mini, it seems that JavaScript was not running. Do all Opera Mini not have JavaScript on it?
Does Opera Mini support full W3C standard HTML and CSS? Or do they have a different one?
Is there any emulator to view or test website in different mobile phones? For example: Iphone browser, Blackberry browser, WAP and Opera Mini.
Thank you!!!
Some websites offer an automatic conversion of your existing website. This converted, mobile friendly website can either be hosted at a new domain, or a "mask" can be applied over your existing site. Check out www.webtosmartphone.com, which easily converts basic websites automatically; a quick line of code and your website will be automatically resized and viewable in the most popular smart phones. If it is not converted automatically, you can request for a custom conversion.
It's up to you whether you want to make two different websites for mobile and non-mobile devices. However, if you do so, make sure to have a link from the mobile site to the full site to enable users to switch to it.
Opera Mini does support Javascript which certain restrictions (eg. on asynchronous operations). Be aware that Opera Mini uses a proxy based approach and the JS is executed on Opera's servers which imposes certain restrictions. Plugins like Adobe Flash are not supported.
Basically, Opera Mini supports the same standards as Opera Desktop since they share the same rendering engine (Opera Presto). However, due to device restrictions, some features like CSS rounded corners are not available in Mini. See Opera Mini 5 standards support for more information, but know that meanwhile Opera Mini uses Opera Presto 2.4, the rendering engine used in Opera Desktop 10.53.
For testing websites in Opera Mini, try MicroEmulator which is Open Source and comes with a resizable skin that allows you to emulate different screen sizes.
Hope that helps :)
You should most definitely adapt your output for mobile devices when the content is accessed via a mobile device. Whether you will do it by separating the mobile presentation on a subdomain or a special folder or not is totally irrelevant.
/ 3. Mobile is way more than just Opera Mini. Various mobile device browsers support various degrees of rich content (JavaScript, CSS etc.) You should look into detecting what features are supported by the visitors browser/device and serve the appropriately rich/"poor" content. You should take a look at WURFL and Device Atlas which are two main databases of mobile device useragents which allow you to serve only the content that the useragent can consume.
There are many emulators out there, some better and some worse, that emulate various mobile device browsers. Off the top of my head, the two I've used are Yo Space SmartPhone Emulator (website broken atm) and Mobi TLD's emulator. There are also vendor specific (Nokia, SE) developer tools you should be able to find that emulate the vendor's devices.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to accomplish this. It does mean that you will need to review your site's use of HTML tables, and convert into a CSS based design.
The CSS Zen Garden is an excellent resource for showing what is possible.
A resource to convert your current
site into a mobile device friendly
format is Skweezer.com. Simply enter
your website's URL, and it will
display your website in a
mobile-friendly version by removing
large images, CSS styles and page
elements that will not display
properly. You can use this as a
template, or starting point, for
making a mobile CSS profile for the
site. To provide an alternative CSS
stylesheet for users with mobile
devices, insert the following code in
the head of an HTML document:
<link href="/css/global.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" />
Ref.
I have designed my site with a 900 x 600 fixed background image. On the computer it looks fine. How will it look on a PDA device? Will I have to design it separately for PDA?
How should check whether my site can be browsed effectively from mobile phone?
What should I do?
Try using Opera's "small screen" view (View > Small Screen). This does a pretty decent job of simulating a mobile screen. Try it on Opera's own site. Note that they use a "handheld" type stylesheet that kicks-in when you're viewing on a handheld or switch to small screen mode.
You can download Google's Android SDK for free to test on.
To test on iPhone, see the iPhone Tester. There's a button on the bottom-right to rotate the iPhone into its widescreen state.
The OpenWave Phone Simluator is supposed to be good.
You can try the mobi online emulator.
The Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Smartphone contains "Windows Mobile 5.0 based Smartphone Device Emulator images & skin files"
Finally, some general guidance: Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices
Instead of browser detection, you can supply alternative stylesheets for handheld devices. With
<link rel="stylesheet" href="small.css" type="text/css" media="handheld">
The advantage is that you only need one version of your site, the difference lies in the stylesheets. You need one additional css, while with browser detection you would need different versions of every page in your site. The downside is that not all browsers support the media attribute for stylesheets. But the most modern browsers do, and the support for it is growing.
If you are interested, I recommend having a look at an A List Apart article.
BTW, if you are not using css yet, switch to it immediately, no matter which solution for your problem you choose. CSS rocks!
You can also get device emulators for the Blackberry range of machines.
Well, you could always throw some detection javascript in there to check the type of browser, then redirect to a different site that is formatted for mobile devices. This seems to be the norm for most sites.
Examples:
Digg.com
Twitter.com
Google.com