Category: Mobile

Our 30-Point Mobile Website Inspection

February 17th, 2012 · · Marketing Audits, Mobile No comments

Is your website mobile-ready? Here are some reasons why it should be: 

1. One half of all local searches are done through mobile: This means that if your site is not optimized for mobile, you are giving a weak user experience to fully one half of your users. 
2. By 2014, mobile should overtake desktop in terms of internet usage: Instead of thinking of mobile as an alternative way of accessing your website, you should think of it as central. 
3. Americans spend an average of 2.7 hours a day socializing on their mobile device – that’s over twice the amount of time they spend eating. It is important for marketers to meet people where they are… and more and more every day, they are on their mobile devices. If you are a restaurant, you the guy who got texted a link to your location to be wowed by your site. If you are a store, you want someone to easily transact with your site through their devices.
4. Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than Macs in 28 Years. This represents both a huge risk to those businesses that are not mobile-ready and a huge opportunity for those who are.

About Our 30-Point Mobile Website Inspection

Our 30-Point Inspection accomplishes the following:

  • Using W3C Mobile Best Practices we  meticulously determine how your site is doing, and what can be improved.
  • We take conversion best practices into account in terms of calls to action and purchasing behavior.
  • We create unique experiences built for mobile devices based on successful implementations, not trends.

What to Do With the 30-Point Mobile Website Inspection

Our clients put the 30-Point Mobile Website Inspection to a variety of uses:

  • Use it as input to work with your current developers.
  • Take advantage of our directory of both outsourcers and local mobile developers.
  • Work with Convert Innovations to build mobile sites and applications.
Contact Us using our page, or call us at 416-642-8470 for more information.

The Mobile Website Difference

February 6th, 2012 · · Mobile No comments

Building mobile-ready websites is a very different proposition from building standard sites. The design is different, the technology is different, and in many cases even the purpose of the site is different.

In terms of technology, the key is HTML5. This is a relatively new web programming language that is key in building mobile websites. It allows for highly advanced interface as well as a wealth of potential content without having to resort to additional languages or technologies. For instance it’s not unusual for a website to make use of HTML, CSS, Java, Flash, and so forth. This jumble can often slow down the user’s experience; lead to different experiences depending on the user’s operating system, computing platform and Internet browser; require additional downloads; open up security holes; or lead to crashes due to overcomplexity.

HTML5, however, dispenses with many of these problems, providing a powerful yet efficient language that offers benefits that previously could only be found by using a range of languages. It’s highly stable and secure.

Design-wise, the combination of HTML5 and the touch-screen interface of portable devices opens up amazing potential for building mobile websites. Indeed, at the risk of sounding dramatic, it’s an entirely new paradigm.

Today’s websites are essentially static, with twenty-year-old conventions we all take for granted: menu bars, top images, text links, slideshows and so forth. But when using HTML5 to build a mobile-ready site, you can craft an experience that feels far more like an app than a mere website.

To see the difference, try doing a Google image search on a portable device. Instead of a grid of pictures, you get a slideshow of images you navigate by swiping the screen. Or try pointing your mobile device’s browser to the Toronto Star’s website — you’ll find it a completely different, and probably far more enjoyable experience than the standard website.

And that is only the beginning. HTML5 allows for media-rich interactivity the likes of which we have never seen. It will take the Internet experience, strap it to a warp drive, then fire it to the other side of the galaxy.

The revolution will be so complete that we can only begin to imagine what it will look like.