I just upgraded my nonresponsive website (in footer) to Fwy 7 Pro. The upload went fine, and the pages open fine. So far so good.
From perusing this forum, plus having a few veterans offer me advice, I gather that to make my website fully responsive, I would basically have to rewrite every page, one at a time.
My question: the website is ~320 pages long. Are there any tweaks I can do short of a complete rewrite to escape the wrath of Google’s upcoming new mobile-friendly algorithm?
David, Google Analytics indicates that 33% of my traffic is from mobile, 51% from desktop, and 16% from tablet. Curiously, StatCounter shows only 23% from mobile.
The website is self-funded, nonprofit, informational in the religious niche. My hope is to reach as many readers as possible, naturally, but there is no financial incentive.
My “gut” instinct is just to leave the responsive changes alone and simply concentrate my energies on adding new content. The web pages read OK now both on desktops and on tablets. And they read tolerably well in landscape mode on smartphones … (hmm, sounds like I’m resolving my own question)
My question is really about whether your traffic is coming through a Google search rather than from what sort of device.
Obviously if Google is going to penalise you for not being mobile friendly it is worth knowing how much of your traffic actually comes through Google. Then way up Google traffic vs Others.
Your site would be close to trivial to remake in responsive form. You don’t need to use inline ‘layout’ techniques – responsive is not a synonym for inline, or vice versa – as the overall structure your site has now is very straight-forward and the content isn’t pulled in from a database and slotted into template areas.
(Where inline techniques are very useful is when your content is fed from a database and could vary in amount, making a complex non-inline layout at risk of breaking and overlapping unpleasantly.)
You could start by simply making the main HTML box in your home page flexible so it keeps its left and right sides the same distance from the window edges. That means it would never run too wide for the visitor’s browser window. Then, if you like, you could use Freeway 7’s breakpoint views to tweak the position on that box at different window widths. For example, maybe when viewed at a mobile device width you could make the HTML box sit closer to the page (and therefore browser window) edges, tightening up the visual margins to better suit smaller screens.
If your navigation item is made using the CSS Navigation action that has an option to switch to the mobile ‘hamburger’ (three horizontal bars) variation at breakpoint width of your choice. You do have to supply the hamburger graphic however, which I think is a slight missed trick. (IMO the action should offer a default and allow people to switch to an alternative if they prefer.)
The above advice does assume that you’ve made everything using layers. If you select an item and the Layer checkbox in the Inspector is NOT checked then there will be more work to do. Although it could be as simple as checking that box for each item…