I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened to me: I’m checking my iPhone at red lights and on the side of the street. I enter my destination in a map or web search, and bam – they’ve got a website. I anxiously click the link, eager to learn the missing piece of information, and I am rewarded with a blank screen with a small blue Lego block in the center... nothing else! What? How can this be? Did the designer/developer of this site, really develop the ENTIRE site in Flash? Come on…even the navigation?

Today, more than ever, it’s become vital for businesses to adhere to some of the most basic web strategies, to ensure this doesn’t happen to every customer who has the luxury of looking you up on the iPhone. It’s part of the reason we advocate for developing two separate sites: One for desktop users, and another for your mobile users. Why not spend a portion of your web budget to ensure an optimal browsing experience regardless of how someone chooses to view your site? There’s no need to download huge images and rich media if you are in a car and just need basic contact information. On the flip side, the desktop/home user would prefer to see the large, beautiful photography and a more complex user experience.

We need to recognize our audiences, and many of them are beginning to rely heavily on mobile browsing. Not providing a mobile-friendly version of your website is making a conscious choice to ignore the fastest growing web browsing audience in the world. If you're interested in our mobile website development services, you can learn more here, or visit m.keenfootwear.com to see a mobile commerce site in action. 

In the world of web design, we’ve thankfully moved beyond the days of having to use a 256 “web-safe” color palette. These days I can help our clients develop visual experiences on the web that are more full-featured and visually rich. With broadband becoming the norm, load times are almost a thing of the past. Transparency effects are a cinch with PNGs, and Flash will let us get away with almost anything.

So what’s left to worry about in the design department? My biggest challenge is the environment in which you view my design.

I know exactly what my layout looks like on my 20” high-definition flat panel monitor in an office illuminated with incandescent lighting. But how does that same layout translate to a 19” CRT monitor under fluorescent lights?

Because of the differences in our visual environments we’re finding that it’s still important to consider all the basic design elements to develop a successful layout that can succeed in different viewing environments for me and my client. Not to mention my client’s customers.

I once listened to a world-renowned game developer discuss the importance of happiness in our daily lives. She predicted that within the next 5 years, the ability to provide products and services that promote happiness and well-being would be the primary metric for measuring success.

A lot of the work we’ve been doing with KEEN Footwear recently has reminded me just how important happiness can be to the process of completing a purchase online. The custom shopping experience we created for KEEN has an array of features that aren’t “necessary” to each purchase, but they go a long way in building a unique experience for each customer. With each customer account comes a KEEN Closet: a visual representation of a closet full of outdoor gear and the products purchased by that customer. “See with Jeans” is another interactive feature allowing customers to see what shoes will look like with a pair of light or dark jeans.

We developed the features to help KEEN stand out from the crowd, and have received great feedback on these extra bells and whistles. With the number of online shopping outlets exploding, it’s vital that our clients’ sites shine and provide an extra splash of “happiness” even when completing an otherwise ordinary task. I believe interactive games and entertainment really are spilling over into the traditional online marketing space, and it’s our job to keep finding new ways to provide unexpected happiness where we can.

Through our experience and research in building blogs for clients, we now recommend using WordPress over other customizable blogging platforms. Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used by hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Using WordPress’s publishing platform allows us the freedom to create customized, unique blogs without having to reinvent the wheel for each project. Best of all, by allowing template customization, our clients’ websites and blogs can share the same design aesthetics. Creating a seamless look between the two allows our clients to communicate with their consumers through a blog, while maintaining the impact of their website.

We’ve recently built blogs for SmartBank and KEEN using the WordPress platform. The SmartBank Blog has enhancements including pictures of the authors and a built in RSS feed feature allowing users to sign up for email blog updates. The KEEN Blog features the same navigation and background as the ecommerce site and an RSS feed.

The WordPress platform also offers a number of free and easy-to-use plugins. We’re currently building a mobile website for a client and implementing a plugin to automatically divert blog traffic to a mobile-friendly version of the blog. By simply uploading the files to the clients’ server, their blog will be instantly converted. And, of course the look and feel of the mobile blog is customizable too!

You can learn more about WordPress benefits here, or feel free to contact us to discuss adding a customized blog to your website.

1.3 billion people can access the Internet from their mobile phones, making the mobile web a new marketing channel predicted to generate $150 billion by 2011. Building a mobile-specific version of a website is important because of the different needs. Mobile users want a quick-loading site that provides important information like directions or contact info.

With recent advancements in mobile technology, you can still provide a rich user experience, balanced with an attractive fast-loading site. Because a mobile website is usually a stripped down version of the full site, most code can be repurposed for the new project.

If you are ready to create a mobile-specific website, here are a few tips:

• Keep it simple – provide simple pathways to information, as it is more difficult to maneuver a mobile device. Divide content over multiple pages to keep each page as friendly as possible.
• Make contact information and directions easy to find and available on each page of the site.
• Scrolling on a mobile device can be tedious. Repeat navigation at bottom of each page so users don’t have to scroll back to the top.
• Use brief, descriptive text and few graphics to aid in load time. Make sure the graphics that you use are small, optimized thumbnails.