Doing Business in the Digital Age

Just as every business came to realize the necessity of having an online presence via a company website, once again, the rules of the game are changing.

A Nielsen survey published in November 2011 showed that 43 percent of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone with a powerful operating system. While that’s not quite yet a majority, the numbers are a powerful reminder of how quickly the technology landscape is changing.

For businesses that are demographics mindful, however, 62 percent of mobile users aged 25 to 34 now own smartphones and among the 18 to 24 and 35 to 44 years old population, the smartphone penetration rate is hovering near 54 percent.

What does this mean for companies doing business in the digital age? It means that the new trend for building company websites is to think first of how that website will translate on a handheld device – whether a smartphone or a tablet.

If you are about to build a website, or have an existing one, there are new considerations to take into account if you want to reach an exceedingly mobile market with your message.
Read advice from local Web design firms on the subject of designing a website in today’s mobile market.

Greg Fry
Your Drawing Board
www.YourDrawingBoard.com
Three or four years ago, we used to build a website based on desktops or laptops, said Greg Fry, owner of Your Drawing Board, a Santa Clarita-based website and graphic design company.

“With the advent of all these mobile devices being used in the business world this has created a dilemma,” Fry said. “All of our clients are saying I can’t see my own website, it doesn’t work right.”

The industry of web designers fought the change at first, Fry said, on the basis that only 1 to 2 percent of the mobile users were doing business on their smart phones.

“We were wrong and had to re-think how we build websites today,” he said. “We’ve done a 180. We’re now specifically targeting and designing websites for mobile devices. Desktops have become secondary.”

When you build websites for desktops, all types of software and languages look great on desktops but not on hand held. The industry had to reinvent the wheel and accommodate all the various mobile devices. Now websites, whether viewed from a desktop computer or hand held device, look fine. But the process of arriving at this point is labor intensive.

“The latest challenge is to make every device happy. It’s very challenging. Now it takes easily double the amount of time to test every single platform. Everything might look perfect on one device and then we check it on another and it’s messed up,” Fry said.

Fixing a website for an iPhone, for instance, might then interfere with how a site is viewed on a Blackberry, he said. Web designers have to test all the platforms now before releasing a final product.

For those companies who have existing websites, there are two choices Fry said. One is to build a new site and the other is to merely revamp their existing site.

“If clients aren’t prepared to completely revamp their entire system, we retrofit their websites to look good on their hand held devices by linking to a second website that works on hand held devices.”

The second website becomes a mirror of the in-house website but is set up with an automated detection tool that can tell what kind of device a customer is using.

“Tablets are driving us crazy now,” Fry said. “We get websites looking nice and sharp, and the tablet makers slightly change the dimension of the screens.”

Every business though, Fry said, absolutely has to have a web presence today. We’re hearing that there is a trust factor involved today for people surfing on the Internet. Users are migrating to businesses where they find the company’s online presence is professional and sharp looking. 

Jacqueline McKnelly
Red Dragonfly
www.reddragonflyweb.com

The thought process at one time was to load a company website with everything but the kitchen sink, said Jackie McKnelly, president and founder of Red Dragonfly, a Santa Clarita web design firm.

The key today is to keep the site really simple, make your brand stand out, have color palettes in it and direct links to another page so it flows properly.

Instead of making a webpage wider, it needs to be skinnier and longer so people using smart phones can scroll up and down, McKnelly said. There’s less real estate on a hand held device so she advises people to only have two to three choices on a site.

“We used to have seven choices or menus across the top of a home page because on a desk top the real estate was so wide,” McKnelly said. “There’s less real estate on a smart phone so we scale it down today.”

The goal when scaling down is for a company to decide if it is trying to be informational or sell products and from there decide what to put on a website and determine where and how to place content on a site.

And don’t put an 11-minute video on the web,” McKnelly said. “People don’t have time and might not watch it.”

She said the goal is to create “sticky customers,” a euphemism for keeping customers on your website as long as possible. Busy mobile customers using hand held devices are likely to leave the website if a video requires too great a time investment.

For customers on the go, or most any customer for that matter, McKnelly advised videos be no longer than one minute in length.

Brian Cuda, owner
Conceptinet
www.conceptinet.com

Unlike the first generation of Internet browsing phones, the new smart phones pretty much do all the work as far as converting a website so it looks right on a hand-held device, said Brian Cuda, owner of Conceptinet, a web design business in Santa Clarita.

Cuda builds a single version of the website but with different style sheets based on the device that’s looking at the site. When a consumer looks at the site on his or her mobile phone, the code detects what kind of device it is and then shows the appropriate layout.

“You can build one site with variable style sheet,” Cuda said. “The other way is to build two sites and add tools that will detect whether the customer is on a desktop or using a mobile device.”

For many of the sites being built today, Cuda says he is using plug-ins available with WordPress.

“The plug-ins will detect a smart phone user and convert a website or blog to a hand held device,” Cuda said. “Third party programmers created forwarding tools and most of the tools are free. They just scale down the website and most will look okay on tablets and phones.”

The issue becomes “usability” because text buttons can be small, hard to press with your finger on a touch phone. But there are a handful of ways a site can be designed to fix that, Cuda said.

“Or you can build a mobile version of your website, set up for a smaller-sized screen.”

The industry has changed dramatically, Cuda said. Ten years ago there may be only 200,000 websites. Google barely existed; it wasn’t even a household name at the time. Today there are probably billions of websites.

Today everything has changed, Cuda said. And designing for smartphones is, well, smart.

“I recently finished a membership site for a recipe business that wanted users in the grocery store to be able to pull up ingredients on a phone while shopping,” Cuda said. “And an entertainment company wanted a mobile app of their website with a schedule of events like screening times for shows.”

Both had to be mobile device-friendly, he said. 

John Duncan, owner
eSolutions
www.esolutions.net

While hand held devices can function the same as a website, the real estate is different, said John Duncan, owner of eSolutions, a web design, development, hosting and marketing company in Santa Clarita.

Companies need to create sites theses day that can detect the type of device a user is accessing the website from, whether that be a desktop, laptop, smart phone or tablet, Duncan said.

“Flash was a very big component of website designs, but the new iOS, or Apple operating systems, still do not support Flash,” Duncan said. “Your website will work really great (on a desktop computer), but on your cell phone the user will just see a big blank space.”

In other words, whatever a company had on their website using Flash will not be viewed by a mobile device user. With the proliferation of mobile devices, it creates a lot of extra work for the web designers, Duncan said. Each mobile device reacts a little differently.

“People who had a very big investment in their website with Flash as a big component are pretty aggravated right now,” Duncan said.

HTML5 renders a lot of similar functionality that we only used to be able to do with Flash, Duncan said. He uses it now to build or revamp company websites so the content is usable regardless of the device a user is accessing a website from.

The landscape is changing, Duncan said, but we’re still one of the only countries that have such a large base of desk top users. For instance, Korea and China are almost exclusively mobile.