Website Upgrades

I started the link upgrades I have been talking about for the last few days, as regular readers will know, but after doing ten more last night, I began to think about the bigger problem of whether my sites with their nice new, all-dancing links will ever be seen. After all, Google has demoted to the dustbin, all websites that it deems to be unfriendly to mobile phones. They have a nice little tool to help you check whether your site passes muster, i think I’ve mentioned it before. Anyway, mine didn’t and couldn’t even be found in a manual search of Google’s top ten pages for it’s search term. That means unless I can perform website upgrades as well, I’m probably wasting my time.

So, I spent four hours last night learning about image compression, image elasticity, the ideal space between tappable objects and optimal font sizes. I implemented every fix they gave me and it increased my website’s mobile friendliness from 65% to 67%. The resulting judgement on my website was ‘unlikely to obtain approval from Google’. So, there you have it, Google has managed to kill off all the small entrepreneurs like me who were building their own static websites.

It won’t affect big business because they either have their own programmers or outsource the work.

I did say static websites though, if you are unable to manage these website upgrades yourself, your site is doomed, but if you run a third-party blog such as Weebly, or you use WordPress, they will have to perform the website upgrades for you. This forces people like me to join companies I might not have wanted to. Google linking with Big Business again.

Now, all these blogging services are free at the moment, but what if Google started buying them up and charging?

Look out for Google making a move on WordPress, Weebly and the rest, because I believe it’s coming. Watch Google, it is not your friend unless you are FTSE or Fortune 500.

As for me, I will ditch all 79 of my websites, but turn my top two into WordPress blogs to go with the other one I already have, so I’ll just have three blogs, and pray for the day when Google gets its comeuppance.

My website upgrades (? because there is a need for both) to blogs will take months, but will not guarantee me a penny of extra income.

All the best,

Owen

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Podcast: Website Upgrades