Media Contour is a multi-disciplined design studio that works and writes about issues, trends and strategies that affect businesses and the design industry. Our goal is to deliver cutting edge, usable information that will ultimately add to your online success.
Internet marketing trends change from year to year. Sometimes these fast changes leave Internet marketers and small brick and mortar businesses alike scrambling to catch up. Here’s the good news. Although 2013 is nearly half over, there’s still time to implement these five internet marketing trends you don’t want to miss out on. (more…)
Businesses today need every competitive edge they can get. In today’s fast-paced world, a mobile website is the very edge you need in order to remain competitive, much less get ahead of your competitors. More and more people are making the move to mobile services for fast access to information and for making purchases. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then you’re leaving money on the tables for other businesses in your field to come in and swoop up.
Mobile websites offer a whole new world of opportunities for business owners to cash in on the “other” half of people accessing the Internet by engaging them with apps, mobile coupons, QR codes, location-based coupons and discounts, and countless other mobile-specific offerings. However, any of these efforts are pointless if you do not have a mobile website that’s compatible with smartphones and other mobile devices.
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“In 2010 more than 50 percent of all Internet access was being done via handhelds of some sort,” reports Inc.com. Those numbers, according to Cisco, rose to 70 percent in 2012. |
The widespread introduction of fourth generation, or 4G, mobile connectivity has generated 19 times more traffic than non-4G connectivity according to Cisco. This means that mobile websites are becoming even more critical for business success.
Even with faster 4G connections, mobile users have come to expect quick loading, easy to navigate mobile websites. If you do not have one, then they’ll simply visit the next one on the list. The real secret to success with mobile websites is to follow the keep it simple philosophy. Mobile visitors want sites that load fast and give them the information they are looking for without a lot of the clutter full websites include.
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“90 percent of websites are not ready to be optimized.” — Get Elastic “52 percent of users who have bad mobile experiences are less likely to engage with the companies.” — Get Elastic |
These statistics tell you that it is your opportunity to be the early bird that really does get the worm. More importantly, this means you could be missing out on business today and in the future by not having an easy to navigate mobile website for your business.
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Consumers spent $25 billion dollars via mobile devices in 2012. Those numbers are only expected to grow as more people make the move to 4G devices and greater numbers of net savvy youth get jobs and enter the mobile marketplace. — Yahoo! Small Business Advisor |
The bottom line is that you need your website to be wherever people are spending money.
Businesses today can’t afford to alienate potential customers by ignoring their mobile audiences. It would be the same mistakes businesses made by putting off embracing social media and could prove extremely costly.
Stay ahead of your incorporation by implementing a mobile version of your website.
It started with a simple box inviting people to subscribe. Today, Geoff Bartakovics has transformed Tasting Table to a thriving newsletter with over one million subscribers. It only took four short years and a fair amount of elbow grease to do it. Not all businesses will grow to one million subscribers. But, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibilities. Here are seven reasons your business needs to publish an email newsletter beginning today. (more…)
Throughout the Internet you can find all manner of articles and blogs dedicated to telling you exactly what you need to do to create the perfect website design for mobile devices. You’ll hear different opinions on content, context, and outright design features that are a must for your site to be successful on the mobile web. However, few of these articles and blogs address the mobile website design issues that could be holding your site back, like these.
Overwhelming text
People who are using the mobile web are often people who are on the go. They want to look information up quickly and with as little pain in the process as possible. Don’t make them scroll through a ton of information they don’t need in order to find what they’re looking for. Less, really is more, when it comes to mobile website design content.
Use of Pop Ups
Pop ups are annoying in the best of times, and downright loathsome in the worst. On mobile devices, they can be completely problematic. It’s best to disable them altogether on your mobile website design for the convenience of users if nothing else.
Burying Your Call to Action
Mobile screens are small. Keep your call to action above the fold (in the visible screen people see when they land on your site) or your conversion rates will suffer.
Not Having a Responsive Design
Different devices are different sizes. You need to have a mobile website design that accounts and adjusts according to these variations. Failing to do so renders your content unreadable to some, if not most, of your target audience.
Links and Objects Too Close
Some fingers are fatter, flatter, or altogether less nimble than others when it comes to navigating around on their mobile devices. Placing links and objects too close together on the screen leads to a great deal of wasted bandwidth (a real problem now that so many characters have dropped their unlimited data options).
Buttons Too Small
Again the problem comes down to fingers. Not only do the buttons need to be large enough for the fingers to fit, but they also need to be spaced an appropriate distance apart so that fingers aren’t constantly tapping the button to the left or right of their intended targets.
Long, Complicated Forms
Mobile devices are portable, and are designed for people on the go. Often times people are in a hurry trying to get to the information they want in a timely, painless manner. Long, complicated forms make this impossible. Ask for as little information as possible from users if a form is absolutely necessary. If it isn’t necessary, save it for your desktop-friendly sites and skip it on the mobile websites.
Not Testing
Test, retest, and then test again. Test your site on multiple devices, multiple platforms, and in multiple conditions to ensure that your mobile website design is firing on all cylinders – not to mention providing a favorable experience for users on each of these mobile platforms.
These things are all small adjustments you can make in your mobile website design that will decrease user headaches and improve user experiences. Give them a try today and enjoy great improvements in response to your mobile sites.
2013 offers exciting possibilities for business across the globe. Following the right website design trends can help change the course of your business in the coming year and beyond. These are a few of the hottest trends going on right now for website design (more…)
Whether you’ve decided that it’s time to redesign your website, or perhaps you’re embarking on your very first business website design, your website is a vital part of building your brand and business, both online and off. Either way, here are 5 strategies to get more traffic to and customers from your website. (more…)
Among the most successful business and corporate websites out there are those that manage to incorporate blogs and social media into their overall web presences. Doing so requires quite a bit of thought. It also requires diligence. These three elements can mix very well, but you do need to make certain that you exercise a bit of control. (more…)
In any field involving design, there will always be trends. Sometimes, these trends offer easy ways for designers to make certain that one of their creations looks contemporary. In other cases, these trends are destined to be short-lived and may not really offer anything to the end result. Website updates generally will follow some dominant design trends in the Internet world but, that being said, it’s important to understand what types of website trends may constitute wastes of time and money. (more…)
According to many different sources, the percentage of overall webpage views made on mobile devices goes up year after year. It’s important to understand what a mobile device is for most of the people who own one. They might not be surfing the Internet in the traditional fashion but they are most certainly visiting webpages, seeking information and performing many of the same tasks that they could only do at their desktop computers before mobile devices became Internet-enabled. This means that making your site mobile compatible is, indeed, a priority if you’re serious about reaching out to people. (more…)
If you’re going to update your website, one of the things you’re going to want to do for certain is to take advantage of what social media has to offer. There are some elements of social media websites that are vastly overblown in terms of how their advertising potential is described. There are other elements of the sites, however, where the realities do live up to the hype. Here are some of the feeds you will definitely want to have connected to or displayed directly on your own website. (more…)
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