14 DAY TRIAL // On the footsteps of Blogger, Google is launching an option to enable Sites users to optimize their websites for smartphones. Whenever a visitor running iOS or Android lands on the site, an custom version is served to make it easier to use on the small screens of the devices.
"As the dramatic growth of the mobile web changes the way people consume content, it’s becoming increasingly important for publishers to provide a good mobile experience," Luciano Cheng, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"With this in mind, we just added automatic mobile rendering in Google Sites for iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2+ devices, and a mobile version of the Google Sites lists," he announced.
The new option is not enabled by default, but if you prefer it and if you believe your site will still look OK with the changes, you can turn on automatic mobile rendering and Google will then serve the optimized version whenever it detects that the visitor is using a mobile device.
"By going to General settings under More actions > Manage site and clicking on Automatically adjust site for mobile phones, your Google site will be automatically adjusted whenever it’s viewed from an iOS or Android 2.2+ device," Cheng explained how to enable the feature.
In order to make the sites better suited for mobile devices some changes are done to the layout, the header and the top bar are shrunk so they fit the width of the display and the content section is also adjusted to fit the smaller resolution and still display all of the text or images.
Also, sidebars, menus, dropdown links are adjusted or hidden to make room for the main content and can be accessed on demand.
Google is also enabling users to list and search through their Apps sites from mobile devices. All of the features are now live and should be accessible on devices running iOS 3.0 and above as well as Android 2.2 and higher.