Google Mobile SEO

Published on April 29, 2015 by [email protected]

As of April 2015, Google has significantly changed the way that websites rank whether they have a mobile friendly website or not. Is your website mobile friendly?

This change only affects rankings for searches that originate from a mobile device. So if your website isn’t mobile friendly in the first place, why would you want to improve your SEO ranking from mobile searches?

The fact is that mobile use is growing every year. According to CBC, 49% of all time spent online is on a mobile device (source).

Ten years ago it was vital that your business simply had a website. Now it is paramount that your business has a website that works on every device especially mobile.

Making your website mobile friendly

Now that you know how important it is to have a mobile friendly website, it is time to do something about it. Google has an online tool that allows you to see how your website looks.

Head over to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and check out how your website performs.

Here are some problems a typical website may face:

Text is too small
Links are too close together
Content is wider than the screen
Mobile viewport is not set

Responsive Web Design

A website needs to not only work on mobile devices, but also work on desktop computers and laptops. In the past, companies would build two versions of a website — one for mobile and one for desktop. Back then mobile devices had their own special markup and were very limited in what they could do. Now, mobile devices have full support for modern HTML standards so today you can build a website that works on all devices.

A responsive web design strategy will enable you to build a website that transforms automatically based on the current screen size. Typically columns are split up into rows, images change size automatically, and header menus get moved into a dropdown tab.

Responsive web design is something that I enjoy designing. If you need help getting your business’s web site mobile friendly contact me and I’ll provide free consultation and a free estimate.

Bryan Wiebe is a web developer and mobile developer living in the Okanagan, British Columbia. He works for Hutz Media Ltd. If you need help getting your website mobile friendly contact me and I’ll provide free consultation and a free estimate.

NetBeans on our Development Environment

Published on April 1, 2015 by [email protected]

What is NetBeans?

NetBeans is an open source IDE used for developing desktop, mobile, and web applications with support for Java, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and more.

We will be configuring NetBeans to develop our web application on our development server. Our web application files will be on our computer’s hard drive and will automatically upload to the web server as we make changes so that our development environment is similar to the production environment.

NetBeans is my IDE of choice because of its strong support for code hinting and built in versioning (Git).

Create a new project

Step 1: New Project

If you haven’t done so already, download NetBeans here.

Right click in the projects section and create a New Project or select File -> New Project. Select PHP Application with Existing Sources.

Step 2: Project Sources

Type in your project name: “new-project.com”. Put the project metadata in a separate folder so that it doesn’t get uploaded to the server. Click “Finish”.

Step 3: Remote Connection

In this step we will configure your new project to automatically upload to the development server whenever a file is changed.

Right click your project and select “Properties”.

Under “Run Configuration” change “Run As” to “Remote Web Site (FTP, SFTP)”.

Add a new “Remote Connection” by clicking on “Manage”.

Enter in the host name of your development server that you configured previously. Select the private key that you created previously. Make sure you select the .ppk version of the private key that PuTTYgen outputs by default.

Create or select a Known Hosts File. If you don’t have a known hosts file yet just create an empty text file somewhere.

Change “Upload Files” to “On Save” and check “Upload Files Directly (temporary file is not used)”.

If everything is setup correctly you should now be able to work with NetBeans IDE with your project files on your local computer. Whenever you make changes they will automatically be uploaded to your development server.

Bryan Wiebe is a web developer and mobile developer living in the Okanagan, British Columbia. He works for Hutz Media Ltd. This post is an entry in a blog series covering the configuration and setup of a Development Environment.