Earlier this summer Ghost Blog Writers went through a major redesign.
We’re always tweaking our design and content.
Your website is a living, breathing being that should always be in flux, but sometimes it’s good to make a big change.
The big change this summer was to finally make our site responsive. This meant that the GBW website you experience on your smartphone is just as good or better than the one you experience on your desktop computer.
There are still plenty of people that access websites on their desktops. For my job, I access websites all the time on my laptop. I think this is true for most professionals that work in an office.
But the trends are obvious. People, especially young people are accessing the Internet with their smartphones.
People Use Smartphones To Access The Web
A new study by eMarketer found that Internet users ages 18 to 24 were spending 50% of their Internet time on smartphones. This was compared to 41% with desktops and 9% with tablets.
For these people and many others, the Internet is their smartphone. It’s the device they have with them at all times. They’re using their smartphone to access news, sports, health and all types of information.
And it’s not just young adults. For Internet users over 50% the smartphone number was still 25%. That kind of surprised me until I thought of how relatively easy it is for people to use smartphones today.
For businesses, the time was yesterday to optimize your online experience for the smartphone. I think we were behind the game a little at GBW. We should have had a mobile experience up earlier, but we finally got it up and the results have been strong.
Our smartphone visits are at 25% in the last month compared to only 13% just a couple months ago.
This seems to prove the point that has been found in other research – people aren’t happy with the mobile website experience.
Poor Mobile Experiences
A recent study found that 52% of consumers said that over half the websites they visited weren’t optimized for mobile. 16% of these respondents said that the majority of the websites they accessed on their smartphones weren’t optimized.
I can see it in the GBW numbers. When people would visit the GBW site on their smartphone they would just leave and not come back at all.
These are potential clients.
So it was way beyond time to update the site. Now the mobile traffic is up on GBW and inquiries have been picking up as well. There are a number of factors that go into that, but I think the site update has played a part.
The biggest takeaway here is that the trend of people using their smartphones to access the web is not going to change. For some people, the web is their smartphone.
If you’re not giving them a good experience you’re leaving opportunity on the table and in today’s competitive business world that’s not really an advantage you want to give the competition.
Image: Vernon Chan