Originally Posted by
kennycrudup
Fiiiine. At least there's some ulterior motive involved and not just "new coat of paint".
Too bad one can't opt back into the older site though.
Yes, AutoSlash is correct. A large part of the world has moved on from desktop PC and now use tablets, phones, and other mobile devices.
As such today websites either must be optimized for mobile browsing and or at least "responsive". Those that fit neither get dinged seriously in search engine rankings, including the all important Google.
There are tons of old, orphaned and or whatever websites cluttering up the web that don't look well on mobile devices. Those are slowing finding themselves dropping further and further back in search engine search pages.
Other issue is that Internet Explorer is no longer the king of web browsers.
Chrome, Safari, Firefox make up the top three, with IE coming in fourth just ahead of Opera which is fifth. This means that websites must also work across two or more platforms as well, or again they get dinged in search engine rankings.