Good business website basics 1 of 3.

This week sees the start of a series of basic, good practice when it comes to owning and operating a website for your business.

We’ll cover three topics that we think are vital to ensure your business can maximise your potential in making your website provide both sales enquiries, sales and deliver your customers the information they need.

This first article covers the topic that has gathered weight and importance in the last 3 years; making your website suitable for all types of devices that visit it – also known as making the website be mobile responsive.

Research released by ‪#‎Ofcom‬ has shows that more people access the internet from their smartphone than they do from a laptop or desktop PC. The actual facts and figures can be read on Ofcom’s website here, but in a nutshell, in Q1 of 2015, 67% of all internet searches are done from a mobile device (mobile phone or tablet) compared to using a desktop or laptop computer.

Wow. But what does that mean to you as a website owner? Well, what it means is that more people than not are looking at your website on a small screen device.

So why is that a problem for me? It’s worth noting at this stage a few technical things to give this all some context.

A website designed more than 3-4 years ago will almost certainly have been developed without the extra set of code rules behind it to make the website display in a better layout that’s more suitable for the small screen. This is done using the style language #CSS. You will almost certain have visited a website on your phone where you’ve had to pinch and zoom to navigate all over it. A pain, isn’t it? However, website in recent years are developed with the addition of the CSS file that makes it display a more suitable layout when the user views it on their phone or tablet.

And there in lies the rub. A lot of business websites were developed some time ago and do not have this flexibility and so when the visitors of that site go to it on their mobile device, they get a bad experience and a bad experience may make them either leave the site or not bother ordering. It’s that simple. Not having a website that is responsive to mobile devices is preventing a huge percentage of your visitors being able to find what they need – whether that’s to order a new pair of jeans or to find information about a service that you offer.

Can you afford to lose this amount of new enquiries?

Here’s an example of a real live website that didn’t have a mobile responsive site and, by looking at Google Analytics, we could see the bouncerate (the amount of people who visit the website and leave immediately) was extremely high.

The website was for a company selling wardrobes and cupboards and was not responsive.

The number of unique visitors on the site was 4883 in a month (average).

The bouncerate was 62%.

Value of online orders/sales was £18k

We made the website responsive.

The next month’s figures looked like this:

Number of unique users on the site was 5222 (average).

The bouncerate was 44% (and at the time of this, falling to <40%).

Value of online orders/sales increased to £19,250 – an increase of 6.9% in sales just in the first month.

The cost of converting the website to a mobile responsive version was paid for in the first month.

So, how good is your business’s website in terms of coping with the mobile environment? Make sure your website can compete in the largest part of online searching – Aubergine’s development team are experts in making sure your website is ‪mobile‬ and ‪tablet‬‪ responsive‬. Call us today for a free assessment of your website. Next week’s topic is about getting the best from Google Advertising.