Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?

/by

If your company depends upon Internet traffic–and what business these days doesn’t?–then know this. According to many sources, including this new comScore report, more than half of digital traffic online now comes through mobile apps. Smartphones and tablets combined now account for 60 percent of all Internet traffic. And that’s growing fast from last year’s survey milestone of 50 percent.

As you might expect, a good amount of that traffic is driven by the entertainment business where digital radio, digital messaging and social apps like Twitter and Facebook rule the day. However if you run a business-to-business company like many of our clients do, you still cannot afford to ignore the importance of mobile traffic.

Another report, this one from SEO platform provider BrightEdge on the amount of organic traffic generated by mobile, is equally enlightening. That study suggest 23 percent of organic website traffic originates from smartphones with another 12 percent coming from tablets. In other words, nearly all organizations should figure that 35 percent of their visitors will be reading their content on smaller devices. And if your clients include a good mix of Millennial users or visitors from Asia where smartphones prevail, then that number is almost certainly higher.

This begs the question as to whether your site is optimized for mobile devices. If it’s not, then perhaps it should be.

Many newer sites, including those we design, are built from the ground up to be responsive. That is, we design using a framework that automatically reflows the content to display well on devices of all sizes. Even the navigation automatically adjusts. For example, a traditional drop-down nav can be made to display in full desktop mode, and a finger-friendly “hamburger” style menu will appear when the content is viewed on a mobile device. And with responsive, there’s no more “pinch to zoom” when using phones and tablets. Text is always full size.

Making a site responsive is best done as part of a site redesign effort. If your site is otherwise solid or a redesign isn’t in the budget, then you might consider making some of your most highly visited pages mobile-friendly. One of the best ways we’ve found to do this without creating a mobile site from scratch is to use a site plug-in designed for this purpose. There are several WordPress plug-ins we’ve found that do a nice job with this.

Until next time….

December, 2014

/by

December 2014—Lots of end-of-year activities are underway as we help our clients close out the year with their marketing materials. Several new website designs are ongoing and still under wraps, but we launched a new site for RM Nephew and Associates earlier this month. A number of design and functionality features  that we put into place for this Boston-based executive search services leader make this site stand out.

First, we designed the site to be responsive. That’s to say the site looks good and works well on devices of all sizes, from smartphones on up through desktop PCs.  Not only does the navigation automatically change to accommodate whatever device you are using, but the content and graphical elements all automatically resize and arrange themselves in the best possible way.

Second, we made the site as interactive as possible to better keep users engaged and to avoid too much text on a page. The Process page is a good example, where visitors click through icons to learn more about the steps RM Nephew goes through to recruit and close a candidate for hire.

RM Nephew specializes in hiring “C-level” executives, including CEOs, CIOs and other senior vice presidents. On the Executive Leadership Roles page we use expansion widgets to open and close descriptions about each role, thereby making the page more interactive and keeping the page depth compact.

May, 2014

/by

May 2014—Several new sites are currently under construction here at Radar, so we can’t disclose just yet what we are preparing to launch. That said, we did complete a number of interesting assignments for existing customers late last month, including a design and content overhaul of the Team pages for long-time client Osage Partners.

There are two Team pages on the site, each housing the photos and biographies of the Osage partners serving under the two investment divisions of this venture capital firm: Osage Venture Partners and Osage University Partners.

The landing page for both Team sections feature names, titles and thumbnail photos of each of the partners. If you want additional background information you can click on a thumbnail and go to the full photo page with more biographical info. And if that’s still not enough, you can go to a full bio narrative, like this one.

Osage believes, and rightfully so, that partners are by far the company’s greatest asset. So the money invested in professionally photographing the team in their everyday office environment was money well spent.

Don’t Put Off Upgrading Your CMS

/by

With so many well-publicized security scares in the news each week, most business people have a good idea how important it is to keep their computers updated with the latest security patches. What sometimes gets forgotten is the need to pay just as much attention to the security of their company websites.

Security wasn’t always such a big web issue. A few years ago, before the widespread use of content management systems (CMSs), most websites consisted of passive HTML files and graphics. While these sites weren’t nearly as easy to maintain as today’s systems based on sleek CMSs like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, they were virtually impossible to hack. Because those old sites lacked the active code and database components that make today’s backend editing process so interactive and easy to use, there were few hooks that hackers could use to gain their unlawful entry.

Today it’s a much different story. CMS-driven websites like the ones we build for clients are chock-full of useful code that provide tons of features that today’s users cannot (and should not) live without. Whether these features are built into the CMS platform itself or added later via plug-ins and add-ons each one introduces new code that in some cases and without the right security cautions included, can be exploited to provide a “back door” for hackers to get in.

Fortunately the good guys are well aware of the potential problems. That’s why CMS providers like WordPress and Joomla regularly update their systems with security releases.  Updating your website to these new versions is usually straightforward, and in the case of the most recent releases of WordPress, can be set to automatically update in the background.

So how often does a CMS need to be updated for security? Usually it’s not necessary to update your site the moment these security patches come out. From our experience updating a site two or three times a year to the newer CMS release is usually fine and will keep the hackers at bay.

There’s one other security to keep in mind. Most sites today use at least a few plug-ins in addition to the core CMS for things like forms management, calendars or interactive photo rotators. Many of these contain code that can also be exploited by the bad guys. But just like the CMSs themselves these plug-ins also get regular updates.

A good “best practice” to keep in mind is checking with the plug-in providers for security updates at the same time you upgrade the CMS. Keep in mind that a security update for the CMS can sometimes “break” the functionality of the plug-in, or vice versa. When possible, it’s best to update the site first and then check the plug-ins, one by one, to see if updates are available and that they still work with the CMS.

Until next time. . .

March, 2014

/by

March 2014—Early this month we launched a new site for Minding Your Mind, a Philadelphia-based organization dedicated to helping teens and young adults deal with stigma often associated with mental illness. Our goal was to create a bright and attractive site that would appeal to both young people as well as parents, teachers and other adults who want to learn more about helping them. A key part of what MYM does is its educational speaker program, which we wanted to feature prominently on MYM’s homepage.

The new site uses a slideshow rotator to showcase each of MYM’s twenty-something speakers in an informal coffee shop photo. Click through on the photos brings you to a full speaker biography page where an even larger photo is featured. From here, visitors can click on links to book a speaker at their school, check out the latesst news, and find out about upcoming events.

Here at Radar, we appreciate and endorse the good work that Minding Your Mind is doing, and hope to see similar programs implemented elsewhere in the U.S. and beyond.

Fair Use Content: What’s Fair, What’s Not?

/by

Clients often ask us for content advice when setting up their sites. One of the questions that comes up the most involves use of external content. First they want to know how much of the better industry content that’s out there they can safely repurpose without copyright violation. Then they want to know what are the best practices for doing so.

But first a little background. Generally speaking, the best possible content you can feature on your website is original content. Both visitors to your site and Google love fresh, interesting and informative articles that speak to them directly about solving business problems. Whether web pages or blog posts, original content is far superior to anything else you can find on the web and re-post on your own site. That said, companies that are attuned to an industry niche are frequently in a good position to curate the best content for others.

The “fair use” question usually arises when it comes time to build the News section for a site. For clients that are well established and generating their own interest with the media, the News section is rarely a problem. They can easily quote from their own press releases and link to stories in the media that are about them. For startups or smaller companies that are infrequently mentioned by others, creating and maintaining viable News is more problematic. That’s when the temptation emerges to copy and paste the articles into their sites.

We understand the temptation, but always caution our clients to not go there. Wholesale copying of large blocks of text, even when attribution is included, is widely regarded as violation of U.S. law. The law is somewhat murky but the the U.S. Copyright Office interprets it thus:

Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work.

So based on this interpretation, is there any way for a small marketing department to legally leverage relevant industry content without putting their companies at risk? A good best practice that works for many of our smaller clients is to publish only the headline and first two or three sentences of the article of interest. Include the day, year and publication name of the article in question and be sure to link to the full text of the article on the publication’s website. Doing so avoids copyright violation, provides your readers with valuable content they might otherwise miss, and helps to generate more web traffic to the publication’s site all at the same time.

A good example is how our latest client, McNulty and Associates, handles News content here.

Until next time. . .

January, 2014

/by

January 2014—Our first new site of the year launched yesterday, and it’s for a new client in the competitive intelligence space. McNulty & Associates, based in Groton, MA offers an interesting “Price to Win” service where it predicts for clients what the likely price will be for winning a government contract. It’s a lucrative field, to be sure, with all the government defense work coming out of Washington.

We deal with high tech clients everyday, but McNulty & Associates introduced us to some new terms outside of our normal circles. One of these is “black hat” services (yes we had fun illustrating the term with a black stetson hat). Turns out black hat in this context means being able to provide clients with an independent view of the competition. Without having a black hat on your side, you risk analyzing a multi-million (or even billion) dollar project based solely on your own peoples’ point of view — a dangerous situation with so much at stake.