The Future of Web Design: Google First Websites

In the near future your website may have to be Android first, Chrome first, Google first. Maybe even Google Phone first. Apple, Microsoft, and others are doing little to change this. Unfortunately the problem is caused by consumers, who buy a phone, turn it on, and Google becomes their god. And they leave it that way. We've created the thing that controls us and irritates us.

Their demands and expectations of massive news websites, sports sites, shopping sites, and others are increasingly affecting small businesses. Many of the things they expect of those sites don't make sense for small business sites. A website for Fox News and a website for Sally's Bakery are about as different as night and day, but Google sees no difference. They've either stopped caring or the web is becoming too hard for their gen-whatever employees to figure out. Either way, your website needs to stand up to some absurd expectations you probably aren't aware of.

Google figures your website should use HTTPS/TLS (a brilliant technology but pointless for most small businesses), AMP and content delivery networks (a great idea for powerhouse ecommerce sites like Amazon and Ebay, but nearly useless for small local businesses), and possibly PWA (making websites behave like apps, blending components of both).

They require certain coding practices and page flow (specific placement of elements, above-the-fold content, ads, etc.), special treatment of links to your website from other places on the internet, it must pass their mobile friendly test, PageSpeed test, and abide by their quality guidelines. And of course you should be using Search Console and Google Analytics.

They expect your site to use the latest coding techniques, even if it means your site won't work for a large number of people because their phones or browsers don't have the latest updates. Getting the latest updates isn't always a smart thing to do, there are often valid concerns around security and bugs. And some users simply can't get the latest updates for a variety of reasons. Too bad for them.

The future is yet to come, so we'll see how far things continue on this path before a change happens. I think a fundamentally new way of looking at the web is on the horizon, at least from a search point of view.

This post is an epilogue to my article about The Evolution of Websites on SGDM.

Some Common Webmaster Mistakes

Note that this video is from 2013, although I doubt much would change if it were answered now in 2016. Same philosophy, different implementation.

Google Wave Revisited

Chatting with a friend the other day about the demise of Google Wave inspired me to find my original post about it. Turns out it was one year and one day between my post (Aug 03, 2009) and Google's acknowledgement (Aug 04, 2010) that it was a failure.

Here's my original post about Google Wave, no need for further comment.

And here's Google's official blog post ending support.

Stats: Browsers Used By Visitors To Our Sites

Here's a current look at the browsers being used by visitors to the heaviest traffic sites that we operate. No big surprises with Internet Explorer leading the pack, followed by Firefox.


Without saying too much about our clients, trust me when I say this traffic is very broad in scope. These statistics reflect traffic to sites in many unrelated industries, with very different target audiences and user demographics (from highly educated specialists to random consumers, and from world-wide to Peterborough-specific).

An Inevitable Look At Google Wave

Google seems convinced that real-time communication will change the world. As opposed to the current, and absolutely intolerable, 3-second delay in uploading blog posts, emails, or tweets.

(Some of my friends have actually discovered something called the "telephone", which is truly brilliant for "real-time" communication. I've even heard tales of multiple people using this device to chat at the same time! Don't look up "Skype" or "iChat" unless you are prepared to be amazed.)

- OMG, they're having a live chat!? That's MAGIC!
- Build your own blog... you mean like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Amazing!
- Embed stuff like videos, pictures, links, and feeds into your blog? Uh... you mean like Facebook, and Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Incredible!
- Share photos? Sure, I'll believe that when I see it! Wow, you people must be on drugs!
- Real-time collaboration tools? You mean like the business software that has been around for years, that only a tiny fraction of the market ever has, or ever will, use? Genius!

Sites like Plaxo and Friendfeed already aggregate your content from multiple other sites. Almost all of the blog and social sites I've joined have asked for a dozen other logins during the signup process, so I could do everything from that site without logging into the others. All my blogs, messages, pictures, video, audio, and friend updates from all over the web can all be organized by any of these sites. Kind of like Wave, except they really exist.

Pretty soon Google will "develop" something that is simply Skype, but they'll have a big press release, call it Google SpeakBonanza, and tell everyone it's groundbreaking for some reason.

Here's why I think Wave will suck by trying to cram everything you could ever do into one window:

1) If your browser crashes, everything you are doing crashes all at once. How dumb is that?
2) It takes away the freedom of being able to move any window anywhere on your desktop (two desktops in my case).

It won't make anything faster, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or more fun. I honestly don't understand what they're thinking. It's lame, limiting, and a step backwards compared to what already exists.

Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding. We'll see what happens over the coming months.

Quick Update of Big News

Here's some of the biggest news of the past couple of weeks:

Facebook is implementing real-time search, and also just acquired FriendFeed.

Yahoo & Microsoft have formally announced plans to merge their Bing and Yahoo search services somehow. Everyone has seen this coming, but they've finally confirmed it.

Google's Webmaster Central team says of the "Caffeine" update: "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." As with every algorithm update, confusion and bizarre assumptions abound. Now Matt will spend a few weeks answering dopey questions as usual.