www.snowride.co.nz

Online retail is a great way to target all geographic areas of your market, especially if you only have one shop down in Christchurch.  Richard Naylor, owner of Snowride, came to us looking to improve his website sales after having a few months of slow results. Considering snow gear is predominantly a seasonal buy, Richard needed to find a way to keep bringing people back to his website even in those warm summer months.  After talking with Richard, we agreed the best place to start would be to have a look at his existing website to see how it could be improved. Some of the results of this review, and the subsequent changes that we made can be seen in the image below.

What changes we made

The first noticeable difference when comparing the before and after, is the utilisation of space. We made sure to make the most of the valuable space by changing the positioning of the menu, header, and other important information such as a visible phone line. The menu was also simplified to be more customer friendly as the existing one was hard to navigate.

Situated above the fold was a large textbox, which no one read. Switching to a slideshow not only draws customers into the website, but also allows them to see offers, which acts as a conversion pathway. Introducing regular special updates is a good way to capture the customer’s attention and to keep them coming back. Not only that, but it is good for SEO.

Snowride was aware that getting the right size was a main worry for their customers. We accommodated this by introducing a sizing chart. Additionally, the ‘Buy Back’ tab was implemented to act as another draw for the customer to return to Snowride. For parents, this is quite a favourable offer, especially for those with more than one child. By making this more visible, customers are more aware of this service.   

Our Strategy

The utilisation of both a heat and scrollmap helped us to understand customer behaviour after the website went live. The scrollmap showed us how far down the page customers were going, and whereabouts they abandoned the page. The heatmap lets us see what’s “hot” i.e. what links customers were interacting with the most. This allowed us to make any changes to the layout in order to increase conversions.  

And the results are ...

Following from the changes on the website Snowride saw dramatic changes.  Within the 90 days after their website went live, Snowride earned more than the entire 2012, this was a 161.5% increase. These results were particularly impressive as the 90 days were in summer and autumn months. Snowride’s conversion rate increased from .13% in 2012, to .34% most likely due to the increase in traffic. These results accurate at 24 May 2013.

These results are already fantastic and we have not even hit the winter months yet!

Over the last few years, more and more people and businesses are using mobile devices to browse the internet. Nearly a third of New Zealand internet users access the internet via a Smartphone; and this trend will continue to grow in the future. This means that with more and more different types and sizes of devices coming online, your website pages will need to look different depending upon what is displaying them. Enter responsive design.

Responsive design is a way of designing web pages for mobile and desktop devices; in fact, the idea behind responsive design is that you design your web pages so that they respond to the device that is viewing it. Rather than forcing a mobile user to see a desktop site, a laptop user with a small screen to scroll horizontally to see a wide-screen monitor site, or a wide-screen monitor to view a site as a mobile customer might like, the design looks at each of these scenarios and adapts to display the content most effectively.

Why Responsive Design is a Good Idea

The best web designs are the ones that make things easy. Responsive web design makes your website user friendly for mobile customers. It is web design that responds to the user as they arrive at the web page.

Think about your typical desktop browser. Even if it is not maximised, it almost certainly has a width of at least 960 pixels. That is a lot of space to place lots of columns of text and images. If you compare that with a smartphone in portrait mode, you are looking at a device with about 480 pixels of width. That is half the screen space. A feature phone has even less space with 320 pixels or less in most cases.

If you create a page with a fixed-width layout 960 pixels wide, it will look great on your desktop monitor. But when you view it on a tablet, it’s going to look small. A smartphone will make it look even more cramped  and on a feature phone, the page might not display correctly at all.

However, with responsive design you create a design that works for any of the devices visitors to your website use. What sets responsive design apart from other methods of mobile websites is that you don't create a separate webpage for every type of mobile browser you want to support. Instead, responsive design simply looks at the features of the device viewing the page, and delivers the styles appropriate for that device.

Creating a Whole Separate Website is a Bad Idea

It can be tempting to create a “mobile” site with a separate sub-domain or site location. Then you just put all the mobile friendly site features like single-columns, limited content, and reduced navigation in that one location and point mobile users there.

In the short term, this can work, as it gets up a mobile site quickly. But eventually it will start to cause problems. The first issue comes when you realise that you have to post every article twice; once to the main site and once to the mobile site! Why create that extra work for yourself?

Responsive Design Treats Mobile and Desktop the Same

A responsive web design uses the exact same content to create a page that works whether you are viewing it at 1800 pixels wide or 320 pixels wide. But the pages that are created may look vastly different, while containing the same content. This means that whether you come to the site on an iPhone or a 27-inch iMac, you will get the same content; in fact you will go to the same URL. But on the iPhone you might see the page with only one column while the iMac gets five. But they are both considered equally important when delivering the content.

The website responds the the device and adjusts accordingly, while still retaining the important content.                             

Take a look at an example in action on a few different devices

Is Responsive Design Right for Your Business?

It depends what your customers are using to visit your site. You may find that it is not cost-effective enough if only a very small percentage of your customers are using mobile devices to view your website. You can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website that comes from mobile devices like iPhones and Android devices. All traffic from mobile devices can be viewed by device or carrier under the 'Visitors' section in the 'Mobile' tab of your Analytics account, or in the 'Mobile advanced' section.

Responsive Design at Zeald

Zeald are now offering responsive design on all our websites. Check out our online store to find out more about how you can get responsive design for you website. Prices start at $597 with monthly fees of $17.

 

Last year was a huge year with major changes in the way that people have used the Internet, which in turn changed the way businesses market their products and services. 2011 is set to follow the trends started in 2010. Here are our top 8 picks of the some of the predictions:

1. Video will continue to rise

With the rise of mobile handsets that have video capability, the use of video has become very common and this year video will become very important for sales and support. The growth of streaming TV with Apple TV, Google TV and Zune, TV will become more popular. These technologies will make it easier and give users more choice to watch TV as they like and when they like. This will also cause a huge amount of bandwidth to be used up both through cables and mobile. It is predicted that this will slow down the Internet so it's still very important that websites are fast loading.

2. Growing cloud computing

There will be a rise in web apps following the success of mobile apps and as a result cloud computing will grow. This means a lot of content will be shared online - documents, files, videos and audio.

3. Social media will continue to grow

Experts everywhere believe that social media is here to stay and it will no longer be considered new or an optional marketing activity. People now expect to be able to communicate with businesses on multiple platforms and instantly. As a result, businesses will start integrating social media into their other marketing activities - with a focus on ROI. Facebook has developed a great weekly reporting system along with analytics on every post which makes it easy to measure the level of interaction.

4. Referrals based on network

Search engines have already started including results which include any mentions from anyone in your social network to do with your search phrase. This will start to grow even further as your network will start influencing your search behaviour even more. Users will be able to see who in their network knows the dentist they are researching or went to school with the accountant they are looking into.

5. Online advertising

More business will start testing out online advertising - not just with Google Adwords but also Facebook and Gmail advertising which will be content based and highly targeted.

6. Email marketing

Despite the rise in social media marketing and online advertising, email marketing will still be a strong player in marketing activities for businesses. It will still be seen as a low-cost and highly effective tool to promote products and services.

7. Mobile marketing

Marketing on mobile devices has been talked about a few times over the last few years but finally it is predicted to take shape this year, especially for the small business market. This doesn't meant that more businesses will start texting or using mobile ads but instead it's about offering mobile payment systems and any apps related to it. Increase in usage of location-based social media like Foursquare means that location-based offers could come into play in 2011.

8. Local searches will become prominent

Searches relating to a particular location will start becoming very prominent in 2011. The potential to attract new customers via local search is massive. Depending on the IP address of the computer, search engines are already able to provide search results relative to the location. Now with mobile devices, it's even easier for Google to find out the exact location of the user and therefore provide them with very targeted search results. This provides a massive opportunity for small businesses like restaurants, accommodation facilities, lawyers, plumbers, retail etc. so getting your web pages optimised for location will become very important.

Over the last few years, the use of Internet and other electronic media for marketing purposes has been steadily increasing, especially as marketers have realised the cost effectiveness of using online marketing compared to traditional forms of advertising.

In a recent survey, top marketers around the world were asked "In the next three years, do you think marketing's effectiveness will increase, stay the same, or decrease for each of the following?" And their predictions are as follows:

As you can see from the survey results, social media is seen by most of the marketers as being a very effective channel over the next three years, followed by online videos and search engine optimisation.

We have summarised the top eight marketing trends to watch out for this year:

1. Social media

Unless you have been hiding from the world, you would have noticed that social media is definitely on the rise. Although Facebook started as a means to share personal information, an increasing number of businesses are using it to build their brand and protect their reputation. Twitter is another example of a place where it's all about listening to what people are saying about your brand and being an active part of the community by contributing information to your followers.

This trend will continue and blogging will be on the increase. Companies will use their expertise to write articles and blog posts, and use social media to promote them. It will also be used as a way to build a community and network with other professionals.

2. Tweet votes for SEO

Google has always strived to provide the best possible information to users and display content that comes highly recommended and suggested. The search results on Google are based around this principle so Google looks ranks results from the most trusted companies higher than the rest.

The next stage in the evolution of the search rankings is using the data gathered from Twitter. So the search results would take into account the number of recommendations a company or a person is receiving on Twitter and rank the content by this person higher on search results.

Google's biggest challenge here is ascertaining whether the Twitter user making the recommendation can be trusted.

3. Personalised search

If you rank well on search engines and earn solid traffic through to your website from the rankings, it will become even harder to unseat you from this ranking. This makes it even harder for start up companies to rank higher as the well established, well performing sites will stay where they are.

To overcome this challenge, it is also predicted that there will be an increase in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, because Google might start rewarding companies that get click-throughs from PPC campaigns.

With more people spending time online, 'online branding' will become more important - companies will invest more in online branding. Currently only 6% of branding dollars are spent online, which is very small when you take into account the proportion of time people are spending online these days compared to driving or watching TV.

4. Faster load times

Google has already talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how they want to do everything they can to make the web a faster place. So it is fair to assume that Google will begin taking the speed of a page download into account when ranking results. So if you want your page to rank higher on search results, the loading speed will also become a factor.

Loading speed is also an important factor with mobile phone browsing because users on the go will not have the time to wait for a slow loading website. Research already shows that majority of web users will leave a site if it takes longer than 8 seconds on a 56k modem. With mobile phone browsing, we can safely assume that this window will be even smaller. So doing everything you can to make your pages load faster will become the way of the future.

5. Two-Engine World

The picture explains it all really.. If you are considering an online Adwords campaign your best options are to go with Google or Yahoo.

6. More queries but less traffic

Search engines are starting to give answers to users' questions without them having to leave the search engine page to another website for answers. This makes for a better user experience and return visits because it speeds up the process of getting answers. This means that as more search engines provide instant answers without the users having to click through to the websites, the less traffic companies will see coming through to their sites. 

Inline search results

7. Conversion Rate

Improving conversion rate is the best way to ensure increase in revenue. Basically you have spent all this time and money in advertising and promotion to get people visiting your website, and if they are not taking the action you want them to take it's all going to waste. Improving conversion rate is the most under-utilised marketing activity, yet it can give you the most return on investment.

In 2010, this will become a bigger focus as coming out of recession, it is now time for companies to assess their spend and see what activities are giving them the value and also what activities are increasing awareness.

Conversion rate is not just about having a marketing activity in place and testing it once, it's about having a process in place that slowly improves your conversion over time. It about making regular and incremental changes across the board to start seeing the return on investment.

Zeald has a large focus on conversion rate and has a proven process in place to help companies improve their return on investment. Talk to one of our E-Business Consultants to find out how you can improve the conversion rate of your website.

8. Email marketing

2010 will be a year where marketers will continue to rely on this channel because everyone is becoming more aware of the importance of establishing and maintaining good relationships with customers.

Marketers will get more experimental and original with content and tone of emails in order to engage customers and compete with social media. For example, the popular publishing platform Squidoo sends out very quirky and humorous newsletters to get the attention of their customers.

Are you wondering what the web will be like in 2010? Here are the top eight predictions for the trends to look out for this year:

1. Mobile browsing

It's becoming increasingly common for people to own cell phones that offer web browsing. This trend will only become more prominent as phones with better browsing functions become available. And due to this increased usage, it is predicted that internet access through mobile phone will get faster and cheaper so users can enjoy instant gratification - they can jump on Google search to get answers or email people on the go. No need to wait till you get to a computer anymore.

The limitation with this trend is that the screen on traditional mobile phones are too small for general internet browsing. And since there are hundreds of popular websites out there, it is not plausible to expect all websites to have special 'cell phone' size screens available. So instead, companies like ASUS are already experimenting with flexible screens that can be folded open to a bigger size.

The mobile browsing phenomenon also poses a challenge for website design as the design needs to be optimised for smaller screens but also needs to keep in mind the fact that more users are browsing the web on computer screens with higher resolutions than ever before.

2. Realtime Bigtime 

We have all seen the social networking storm - with the use of sites such as Facebook & Twitter, we now expect and demand our interactions to be immediate and in realtime. We expect that when we want to talk to someone, we can instantly engage in a conversation, not in a day or two. This means that if your customers want help or information, their expectations are now altered, they want to hear from you straight away.  

Businesses will continue to increase their investment in online communities and social media like Facebook & Twitter because these communities and their voices can no longer be ignored. And not to mention if you have a disgruntled customer, gone are the days where they would tell 10 people about their experience. Bad experiences now simply get posted on sites like Facebook and Twitter for hundreds of their friends and followers to see. Therefore, it will become necessary for companies to start engaging in a discussion with their customers rather than just than one way communication like traditional advertising. And marketing will begin to drive this increased investment in social media.

Another trend to look out for is real-time collaboration through applications such as Google Wave, which a merge of instant messaging with e-mail and facebook. Wave is a platform for getting things done together so you and your colleagues can work at the same time sharing information, working on the same documents, using instant messaging services and social networking.

3. Content 'curator' 

The biggest challenge of recent times has been the large volume of content available on the web, and it is growing a lot faster than our ability to consume it. And experts predict that in the near future, the content on the web will double every 72 hours! So we are pretty much at an 'information overload' stage - which brings up the question, how can companies like Google source the right information for us?

Google Search and News currently uses complex algorithms that give the highest ranking to websites with the most relevant content and also websites that are trusted. But this falls short of personalisation, meaning it doesn't take into account our personal preferences and slants.

In 2008, the answer to this challenge revealed itself: your friends are your filter. With the launch of 'Facebook Connect' program, Facebook allows sites to offer content personalisation based on the preferences of your network. So say you have a network of friends that like cars, some of the content around your Facebook page will relate to this particular interest. 

And now Google's Social Search experiment is investigating whether web searching can be improved by using information learned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. So when you search for a particular topic, the results on the page will include posts that your friends or family have put up on the subject. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from the links they direct you to the web, the movies you watch, books you read and TV shows that you are into.

A Google search for 'New Zealand' shows content from your friends

4. Location Location 

Fueled by GPS in modern smartphones, location-sharing services like Foursquare, and Google Latitude are suddenly becoming popular. With these location-sharing services, people are able to use their phones to tell their friends exactly where they are and get recommendations on where to visit and what to do in the area.

These new services also open up a whole new type of usage like getting a coupon or a review from your friend for a cafe right where you are. And since you know exactly where your friends are at anytime, you can also meet them for a coffee.

It's a new layer of the Web. Soon, our whereabouts might optionally be added to every Tweet, blog comment, photo or video we post.

5. Mobile payments

Much of Asia has already embraced the mobile payment technology but other places like U.S. in particular, have lagged. In 2010, there is reason for optimism: big players like PayPal and Amazon are starting invest in the mobile payment opportunities. So users can now purchase things on the go, especially for items such as concert tickets and bidding on auctions, this service will become very popular.

Another newcomer Square, founded by the creator of Twitter, allows merchants to accept payments via Apple's iPhone. What this means is that now when you have an expo or a conference, you no longer have to worry about having an eftpos machine at hand, you can just use this new little add on to the iPhone to swipe credit cards or eftpos cards for payment.

6. Privacy Erosion 

We're all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter etc., where we display and maintain our personal brands. This means is that now we are voluntarily giving up our privacy through social media applications like Facebook and Twitter, where there is an option to allow all content to be public.

Likewise with location based devices such as phones with GPS, we are giving out more information to public about where we are at all times.

7. The Cloud 

Cloud will become a bigger trend this year. What this means is that you no longer need to save your files and applications onto your computer or desktop. They instead exist on servers online, which you pay per user and pay for as much space as you use  (know as "the cloud"). This makes our data accessible from anywhere in the world without having to take your computer with you. It also allows collaborative work so no need to save versions of files and applications. You and your colleagues can simultaneously work on the same data.

Next year will also see the launch of Google's Chrome OS, a free, web-based operating system that will pose a big threat to the likes of Microsoft Office. This web-based system will be free, require smaller disc space and will not have the long boot time that normal operating systems have. 

Google Docs on Cloud

8. Web 3.0

There is already talk of the future of a semantic web where computers will become learning  machines, not just calculators or machines that can understand patterns. This means that the computers can be taught to understand meanings of words.

Google is already starting to allow websites to set attributes to specific parts of the web page content, which means that the search results now have 'rich snippets' of information. Like for example if you are searching for a restaurant, you can click the 'options' button in Google search and have specific information under each result show up, for example reviews from other people, so you know exactly which one of the results is the most relevant to your search. So you can specify event dates, product ratings, prices, company contact details for you product.. it's just the beginning.

Feb 2010

Screen resolutions have changed very quickly over the last few years. These statistics from W3Schools suggest that today most users are browsing the web with a display of 1024x768 pixels or more resolution, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies, so these statistics might not be realistic for the average user or for users in your industry. Most likely the average user will have display screens with a lower resolution.

But the statistics, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends in screen resolution.

Statistics source: www.w3schools.com

Smart mobile phone screen resolution

The above statistics do not show the use of mobile phone web browsing. Smart phones such as the Iphone and faster, cheaper mobile internet connections have made browsing the web on a mobile phone much more popular. We should be expecting a large increase in users browsing websites on their mobile phone in the next year. Most smart phones have an average display resolution of 480 x 320 pixels
You can see how your website might appear on an iphone using an Iphone emulator

So while desktop monitors grow larger in resolution, more and more users are turning to mobile devices with small displays designed to fit in a pocket.
This creates a website design challenge. When planning your website design you will need to consider which screen resolution you should optimise your design for.

If you think a large majority of your target customers might be browsing your website with a mobile phone, you should consider optimising your website for these users. There are a number of ways that you can do this:

1. Create and maintain a separate website specifically designed for mobile phone users optmised for a screen resolution of 480 x 320 Cons: expensive to setup and maintain
2. Design your website specifically for mobile phones, optimised for a screen resolution of 480 x 320, which will also work on a desktop monitor. Not the best use of screen realestate for wide monitors
3. Design your website as a fluid width single column design so the content fits any screen resolution. Cons: You will need to make images small and you will have little control over the design. Also makes reading difficult on larger monitors with a large number of words per line.

However one needs to consider just how many websites there are on the web and with this in mind it is very unlikely that these websites will change to suit smaller mobile devices. It is more likely that the hardware technology will evolve to allow users to browse websites at a higher resolution.
For example smart phones like the Iphone make it easy for the user to zoom in and out and scroll up and down, left and right. This makes it reasonable easy to browse a website that has been designed for a higher screen resolution.

Other technology that mobile hardware companies are experimenting with to make mobile screens larger include, flexible screens that unfold or roll out, double displays that slide or fold out, projector displays that project onto a flat surface.

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Original article: Published 2007

Screen Resolution

More and more computers are using a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more though many users still have only 800x600 display screens.

 

1024x768 Vs 800x 600

Zeald recommend that websites are designed to fit an 800 x 600 pixel browser for a number of reasons:

1. A significant number - 7 - 10% is still a significant number of customers to make it extremely difficult to browse the website, effectively making it un-usable for them. Consider the real world analogy of a shop, would you close the door to 8 potential customers out of 100 because their technology was not up-to-date? One should also keep in mind, that while the use of 800 pixel res monitors are subsiding....smaller held held devices are on the increase and these work best with a smaller screen res.
2. A web Standard - fixed width 800 pixel wide website designs are the most common format on the web. They are a web standard. IE if you browse the web, you will find 9 out of 10 websites are designed for this resolution....possibly more. This means that when you are browsing the web, most people are familiar with this dimension websites, they are setup for this dimension. When they stumble upon the wider format, it may be somewhat disconcerting, things are not in the same place, it may appear confusing, and difficult to use. A good example I like to use is the Adobe website. A website designed for graphic designers and website designers, who you would expect would all be using the very latest widest fanciest monitors in the world. - designed to fit an 800 pixel wide monitor?
3. Reduced browser areas for user preferences - Because people are most familiar with navigating the 800 dimension websites, while they may use a larger resolution monitor, they may have their website browsers reduced in size to fit two or three websites side by side, or layered so they can see pages loading behind, or next to the application that they are currently working on. They may also have navigation bars set to display down the left hand column of their browser, such as bookmarks or history. The "Screen resolution stats" are not able to determine these user preferences, so no one knows just how many people do this. I know a number of people at Zeald do it.
4. When websites are designed to fit this width, the content area is increased and so the text flows across with many more words per line than is recommended for optimum readability. 7 - 10 words per line. Often this will be increased to 20 - 30 with a 1024 pixel width design....even with 3 columns.

The 100% width setting

is an alternate option however we do not recommend this for the following reasons:

1. banner graphics cannot be designed to fit the full width because the width is variable and image dimensions are 'hard coded'
2. Text set to display 100% on a 'wide screen' exceeds the 7-10 word readability limit. Usability studies show that blocks of text become difficult to read when displayed in long horizontal strings that exceed 7-10 words.

Color Depth

Most computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors:
Older computers and laptops often use 16 bits display hardware. This gives a maximum of 65,536 different colors.
Handheld computers and very old computers often use 8 bits color hardware. This gives a maximum of 256 colors.

Web Safe Colors

A few years ago, when most computers supported only 256 different colors, a list of 216 Web Safe Colors was suggested as a Web standard.
This 216 cross platform web safe color palette was originally created to ensure that all computers in particular macintosh and PC computers, would display all colors correctly when running a 256 color palette.
Unless your website is targeting hand helds or very old computers it is probably not important to design for a 256 display, since more and more computers are equipped with the ability to display millions of different colors.

Example image - GIF: 256 colours (14kb)

Example image - Websafe GIF: 216 colours (14kb)