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Austin businesses - If you have a website you must prepare for Mobilegeddon

More news and advice on Mobilegeddon for Austin businesses. Mobilegeddon arrives in a few days - April 21.

Austin small businesses should take note of April 21, 2015 – that's the day that Google puts in place a new algorithm that will affect the way websites show in mobile search results. If your website is not "mobile-friendly" – more on that later – you may dramatically drop in ranking/position or even disappear from search results made on mobile phones. Considering that 30 per cent of Google searches are made on smart phones, this is a very big deal.

You may think that your website is already mobile-friendly; I mean, you can view it on a mobile phone, right? Wrong. Mobile-friendly means that the website must respond to fit (and not exceed) the display width of the viewing device – on an iPhone 5, this space is only 320 pixels wide (regardless of any retina display pixel doubling). The newest iPhones 6 and 6+ only have slightly increased dimensions  to work with – 375 pixels and 414 pixels respectively. If your content doesn't adapt to fit these small displays, your website will no be considered mobile-friendly. On a "mobile-friendly" website, pinching and zooming is not required to view the content.. only vertical scrolling is needed.

Many retailers in Austin are actually e-tailers – with most of their business conducted on-line. As an e-tailer, what happens when a large share of your customers can no longer find your site via search? Additionally, some e-tailers still rely on older technologies for their shopping carts. They may not have updated the programming or basic design in years. Often this old coding cannot be updated to current programming and design standards that are needed to make the sites mobile-friendly. Sometimes the slate must be wiped clean – and a new website needs to be built from scratch with mobile in mind.

A quick call to Pallasart Web Design at 512-469-7454 can determine if your website is "mobile-friendly", and if not, what can be done to make it so.

Austin is well-known as a technology hub, and there are also a lot of small businesses in our area who rely heavily on web searches for their business. It would be heartbreaking for those businesses to lose traffic just because their websites are not mobile-friendly. It is very important to keep your website’s standards up to date, and keep on top of the newest technology; not only does it improve the look of your website, it will impact your bottom line as well.

Mobilegeddon is coming. Be sure to contact Pallasart Web Design today to ensure you can survive Google’s new search algorithm.

Bob Atchison

Austin Texas Web Design