If you’ve visited this website before, you may be noticing that it’s looking a little different.
In the off-chance that you may be interested in why the change, here’s why.
The online world is changing
The online world is always changing, sometimes for the better.
One major change is the predominance of the mobile phone. Accessing the internet via a mobile device has been a growing trend for several years now, and these days more than half, maybe two thirds of sites are visited this way.
And it makes a difference.
Three effects
- Mobile phones have small screens (yes, I’ve noticed! 🙂 ) so the web page design for them needs to be simpler.
- Mobile users spend less time on a site, they tend to check out the page quickly and move on to something new. So it is less useful to have lots of attractive links, hoping to encourage visitors to check out other pages. And websites need to load faster, to avoid impatient visitors getting tired of slow load times.
- Google’s assessment of which sites appear at the top of its search list is based on how websites appear on a mobile device. So if you want your site to rank highly on Google, you need a very mobile friendly site, which means a site which satisifes the above two requirements.
So my website had to change
This site has been “mobile friendly” for quite some time, but it appears, not friendly enough. The site was relatively slow on a mobile device, Google ranking was down and less people were visiting than a few years back. There seemed to be little I could do to speed up and simplify the design I was using.
The new design
So I found a new minimalist, fast-loading theme – Arke by Danny Cooper available from Olympus Themes. It is very bare bones, just what I wanted.
It eliminates a lot of bells and whistles, so there is now no sidebar, no list of links, no Facebook “Likes”, and probably a few other things I have forgotten. But I’ve kept some of the same feel, so it isn’t too alien.
Until I sort things out, linking around the site may be more difficult, but I’ll find a way before long.
According to Google, the site loads much, much faster now. So it keeps Google happy, and it is just as readable as before.
A drawn-out process
It will surely take me a while to sort out all the inevitable bugs, and adapt things that don’t quite fit now.
If you find a page that’s not working properly, please let me know – use the email link under “Feedback” in the top menu.
Thanks.
Pages I found helpful
- Setting up a child theme. Smashing Magazine.
- Adding a search form without a widget. Mitch Canter
- Drop-down menu. EnvatoTuts.
- Info on images. WPShout and Hostinger Tutorials.
Photo: Pexels.
