google to demote sites if not 'mobile friendly'


2015-04-21
SUCKS! I can't stand most 'mobile friendly' sites. They make me waist time and bandwidth to find the real site ("desktop view") and ussually keep switching back to mobile when i'm in the middle of things (additional waste). UVL has only two mobile quirks that i find lesss than desirable. Can't zoom/pan properly without a browser hack and the top toolbar takes a lot of screenspace for the conviniance it provides. As far as i'm concerned, UVL gets a solid 90% rating for mobile (which is prettymuch the 'desktop view' anyhow) and would get 100% if those 2 quirks were fixed. I hope UVL can meet Google's mobile friendly standards without forcing a 'mobile view' on us.



source: techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/google-makes-mobile-friendliness-a-ranking-signal-worldwide-boosts-indexed-apps-in-search-results/


2015-04-22
You can check whether a site is mobile friendly or not here

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

2015-04-22
CSS has for long supported alternate layouts depending on device, unfortunately website developers don't actually use that and instead force it based on user agent detection. I fortunately don't browse too many sites on which I prefer the desktop view on mobile, and the few I do are easy enough to swap to desktop view either from the site itself or from the browser's own desktop button (which I presume is tied to the CSS device thing).

2015-04-23
Honestly I understand their point with that. Huge portion of internet users are doing so from mobile devices nowadays. Though that doesn't mean desktop friendliness needs to be dropped (would be bad move IMO).

2015-04-23
Most UVL pages are made using the "responsive" technique, where the same HTML adapts to the browser size.
This is the best options suggested by Google and is the one I prefer, and most sites nowadays are made in this way.

It passes the official test by the way: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=www.uvlist.net


The only page that is "half backed" is actually the most important one, the game info page, that is still using an earlier version of my responsive experiments.

This is the most complex page too, as it shows almost any kind of data we host in UVL, and has many editing tools embedded too.
For this reason it was quite a challenge to upgrade it maintaining all the features, and hopefully you should be able to see the new version this weekend. (or at least a test version to get your feedback)

I agree with zerothis that the top bar could be done better, specially in editor mode, and more improvements could be made too, like an option for bigger fonts and other things like an alternate "dark" version, ready when all the site pages will use the new layout.

2015-04-25
As promised, editors can see a preview of the new gameinfo page.

To access you have to edit the page URL.
Go to a game page, and manually edit it so that "game" becomes "gam2"
i.e.: www.uvlist.net/game-19479 > www.uvlist.net/gam2-19479

NOTE: if something doesn't work, or looks out of place, means that it is not finished yet.

Some of the main differences from the old page:
- Fully responsive using the layout found in other pages, like the groups, for example.
- The "user" area (stars vote, own, playing, etc) are going to be moved on the upper right side, to increase accessibility.
- The ratings icons and the user flags status are now merged in a single widget.
- The image thumbnails use the common grid found in the other pages
- The tabs are gone, and are replaced by an accordion (expandable areas). One of the reasons is that there were too many tabs and in small screens it was a mess.
- The accordion let you have more than one section visible at the same time, and remembers the open/close status, just move to another game, and your preferred section are open by default!
- The accordion icons will be replaced with something more meaningful.
- Looking to ways to add more info to closed sections, like the average (fake number right now) in the reviews.
- I have moved the alternate names below, with the idea of making the above part simpler and easier to read, no idea where to put it.
- something else, for sure ...

I know, human beings are refractory to changes :-)
But please remember that some sections are quite unfinished.

-edit-
The tags have now a different layout, just compare the old and the new page with a game with some tags.

2015-04-25
My first impression based on a standard desktop PC with Firefox browser:


- The "user" area (stars vote, own, playing, etc) are going to be moved on the upper right side, to increase accessibility.

Icons are overlapping.


- The ratings icons and the user flags status are now merged in a single widget.

?? Nothing happens when I click the User ratings icon.


- The image thumbnails use the common grid found in the other pages.

I like the changes to screenshots.


- The tabs are gone, and are replaced by an accordion (expandable areas). One of the reasons is that there were too many tabs and in small screens it was a mess.
- The accordion let you have more than one section visible at the same time, and remembers the open/close status, just move to another game, and your preferred section are open by default!
- The accordion icons will be replaced with something more meaningful.

Wow ok thats quite a look and feel change. I must admit when I first saw it I thought the info page was terribly broken. Everything that was under the tabs starts to be open by default? With Zelda N64 you gave a nice example of a game info page that looks bad when everything is open. Very cluttered (on my standard Firefox browser remind you). Scrolling down 120+ tags... ugh. The many description articles don't look good and very unorganized this way. Removing the tabs is definitely the one thing that I am most worried about at the moment regarding my desktop browser configuration. And without reading your info there is no hint that you can click the headlines to close the sections.


- Looking to ways to add more info to closed sections, like the average (fake number right now) in the reviews.

Displaying an average is a good idea. The reason why I never proposed it is because some magazines seem to have reviewed the same game more than once. Sometimes because of a re-release (budget) or sometimes because... well don't know... but Tilt seemed to do so a lot for whatever reason.

2015-04-25
Most issues are due to caching.
It is not fixed, please reload the page.

2015-04-25
Yes looks much better now to have the + to open / close the articles.

One other minor issue. When a game has no aka name, the "aka" text still appears which doesn't look optimal..

2015-04-26 (updated 2015-04-26)
- "Bugs / Not yet added?":
"Author" field is missing.
"Share links" button is missing


- Request: As I said I like the improvements to screenshots and that more shots are visible (if available). What I now miss is something to being able to get a sort of order into the screenshots. Placing the package always at a certain spot, the title screen as well. Package on #1 spot, title screen on #2 or something like that... or the package shot at a complete different location a bit outside the game screenshots.The search with thumbnails function has this kind of order already in place, which looks great sometimes.

Edit: Looking at it again and testing it also on my smartphone it maybe looks better when removing the bigger "main" ingame screenshot completely?

2015-04-26
re: re:
Sometimes because of a re-release (budget) or sometimes because... well don't know... but Tilt seemed to do so a lot for whatever reason.


True: sometimes because of special folder (for example : a special folder about tennis games, so they review again a tennis game). Also in special issue, in which they (quickly) review lots of games already reviewed during the year, but they can also review a game which was not reviewed yet or change the score, so I may have added such reviews. And sometimes, for no particular reason, a game is reviewed again. That, plus the possible re-release, and you can have 4 or 5 different reviews for the same game...

Another thing: I added add-ons reviews to the main game (when the add-ons were just added as a tag + comment to the game, not a new entry). Such games may have lots of different review by the same magazine.

2015-04-26
The new tag layout is a bit odd to me. I was wondering at first why the tags on the right didn't have category names before I realized how they're set up, which leads to alignment problem: there's so much white space between them that my eyes at least can't align them very easily to the categories on the left. Some kind of guide lines or alternating background colors or such would help with that.

The author section looks a bit odd when the authors names or responsibilities in a game cause them to occupy multiple lines. It's readable still, but odd.

Language labels show only half of the label with bottom part cut off.. I suspect that might have something to do with 12px or so minimum font size enforced by the browser tho, but I wouldn't really know for certain.

2015-04-26
- Authors added along with other sections, I'll se to improve when lond names are displayed.
- I'm going to add priority to the primary cover / title / ingame images
- I'd like to put he cove somewhere else, but I've never got any good result. (and we should consider what to do when missing)
- Hiding the main image in small screen could be a nice idea.
- While I like the tags grouping, the three columns layout is a bit weird. I'm going to compact each group removing the columns.
- Yes, the minimum font size could make the language labels weird

2015-04-26
The tags editing is now functional. (it could be improved but at least it has the same behavior as before)
It opens an orange-bordered section in the upper page area,
That section will become the area for most editing actions.

2015-04-26
I had a look at the mobile version (on my desktop computer). Looks good.

However, depending on the width of the window the bar at the top can cover the game title partially.

2015-04-27
Media section feels to be too low. IMO it should be near screenshots somehow.

- Authors added along with other sections, I'll se to improve when lond names are displayed.

Barony has an author with long name and roles related to the game, if you don't have a test case for it already.

2015-04-27
Thanks leszy, the top bar need some fixes.
I'm moved the media section out of the accordion, between the main screenshot and the thumbnails.
I also tried removing the main screenshot area when it is missing.

2015-04-27
New layout for the tags.
The editors have the extra action icons that make it a bit harder to read ... (just access the page in incognito mode to see how it looks for non editors.)

2015-04-30
looks good. but in the case of multiple videos, additional screenshots are pushed off the bottom of the screen. screens thumbnails above of videos maybe? perhaps thumbnails for videos as well? combine screens and vids (like Steam)?

2015-04-30
Yes, having the videos along with the other thumbnails (with a "play" symbol over-imposed) should be the best option.

2015-05-03
Looks very good so far. I like the overall changes.

Found another little bug. A title that has entered as "bootleg" does not seem to appear in the new info page anywhere.

2015-05-06
Actually, I liked it when the tags were aligned. For games with few tags the current solution may be good as well, but when an entry has lots of tags aligning them in columns improves the readability in my opinion.

2015-05-09
I'm not sure about the new tags layout, after some days it feel confusing.

Some updates in the game info page:
- More icons for the collapsible sections ( see some here http://www.uvlist.net/gam2-164090-Left+4+Dead )
- New star rating graphics (I needed a transparent one to better blend with the new colors )
- Real average scores in reviews section
- The green share button is back, beside the other sharing buttons.

2015-05-11
Yeah, lining them up makes it easier to quickly go over them. The problem with the previous one was there was too much space between them and no guide for aligning them horizontally with the category. Lines like seen with the current search would be sufficient for me at least: /groups/search/jump. Multiple columns is fine with that little guide line.