Downtown tech updates to be considered

Susan M. Davis August 7, 2024

“What we had requested the city changed into when they move over the design of Phase three and 4 to examine some modifications – some artistically designed crosswalks, charging stations. If you’re going to have everything dug up, you can as well look beforehand into destiny. We’re absolutely hoping that after the layout for that comes out, it consists of that,” stated association supervisor Helen Rice. Rice noted charging stations are very famous in Europe. She stated it became essential for the DownTown Association to lobby for the era because the downtown vicinity is understood for being ahead of questioning. “We’ve always prided ourselves on being simply barely beforehand of the curve, and we want to retain that.”

The administration advised the community safety committee that ATCO Electric and ISL Engineering will look at possible places for capability charging stations downtown and comprise that into their designs totally free. The crosswalk will also be looked at by using administration. The association is striving to make the downtown extra attractive to a younger generation and feature them spend their time and money inside the middle and era is one manner of doing that.

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As for the pageant road to be built on one hundred and one Avenue, Rice stated that reach of the avenue would not do away with from one hundred Avenue as a substitute. It’ll supplement it. “I see the 2 as complementing each different. I suppose, for the foreseeable future, Richmond Avenue will constantly stay the number one festival road.” Phase three and 4 will not best see the construction of pageant street; it will also see furnishings and lights improvements, trees and different landscaping, and upgraded parking. While the layout will create a commonplace appearance and experience for the general downtown center, Rice said facades of agencies will stay precise to the assets owned and now not be required to have a similar look or style.

She also mentioned groups do sense a pinch whilst creation takes place downtown, however, the association continues reminding them that it’s “brief-term pain for long-time period advantage.” “Anytime you have got a commercial enterprise disruption, a business goes to bitch as it does hurt their backside line quickly,” she stated. Downtown groups will be open all through production nearing the end of 2016; Google started letting web admins know about impending changes to their search engine ranking system that would impact how sites would be viewed in 2017. To continue to rank well in 2017, websites will need to hit certain additional criteria. This article discusses these key new changes that will impact your website’s organic SEO rankings in the Google Search Engine.

The first item on their list is making sure that your site has a published SSL certificate in place. Now, as far as Google search rankings go, you will begin to be penalized if you do not have an SSL certificate in place on your site. One of the first moves in this regard already now in place is that if you do not have an SSL certificate on your site, the Google Chrome browser will insert an exclamation mark “!” on the URL line to let a potential page viewer be aware that the site has not been secured. Clicking on the exclamation mark brings up the details of the security infraction. With the January 2017 Chrome “56” browser update, this new item is already in place in the browser.

SSL certificates are not a major expense these days, and you can get them to put in place for as low as about $26 per year if you are not running an e-commerce site and about $70 or so if you are. Google is very interested in customers being protected as they go to websites directed by Google. They want to ensure that customer data entered on these sites is encrypted and a person’s information is kept safe. In this regard, they will, therefore, be penalizing “organic search-wise” those websites that have not put an SSL certificate in place. So, if being found by Google organically is important to you, this is a step you will need to take with your site.

Next on their agenda is popup ads on web pages, particularly on mobile devices. Google customers find ads that pop up on web pages they visit to be very obtrusive and annoying, and Google has been listening to their complaints. Google has found that pop-up ads often can cover an entire screen on a mobile device and can even be hard to get rid of. So now, as Googlebot crawls your web pages and, in particular, your mobile web pages, be aware that they will be looking on popup adds with disfavor, and your page will be penalized if pop-up ads are found.

Google’s move here is to deliver quality content to their search and “AdWords” customers on behalf of their advertisers. They are on the hunt for quality content pages to serve up – not “Fluff” pages whose primary purpose is to pop up and add to sell something. Advertising on the web will start to change because of this new search engine ranking requirement, so if you want to be found and you currently run popups on your pages, you will want to start doing some rework on these pages. Do standard advertising through anchor text links and hyperlinked images on pages instead – Google will reward you for it instead of penalizing you.

The next change required for 2017 is going to see a lot of people scrambling to improve their website design architectures. Almost half of all Internet access these days is done by mobile devices, including tablets. In a recent study completed by a Google subsidiary company, it was found that the average load time for a web page on a mobile device is still sitting at about 19 seconds to load. This same study indicates that mobile device users, on the other hand, only have an attention span for page loading of about 3 seconds. After 3 seconds, over 53% of users abort, which means that slow-loading mobile pages that Google currently sends customers to via their search engine and on behalf of their AdWords advertisers are not getting loaded.

So things are changing. Google now has set up a totally separate search engine “page indexing” database in their system for mobile web pages. The loading sweet-spot for a page is 2-4 seconds, and if your mobile page takes longer to load than this as it is getting crawled by Googlebot, Google will make a note of it, and your page will no longer be showing up in their search results for users until you can get this fixed.