Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?

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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

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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.