Tips to Provide the Best Website Experience

Fully responsive web design is no longer a luxury for your website. Google announced recently that it will punish websites that are not fully responsive. Not only this, but mobile commerce continues to increase. 2015 may be the year that mobile commerce as a whole overtakes other forms of digital commerce. This has already been the case for many years for many younger demographics.

You must make the switch into fully responsive web design today in order to build a lasting brand online. Here are three top tips that will help you make the transition or improve your scalability and marketability if you have already implemented it to some degree.

Natural Asset Scalability

The only responsive website design themes or templates that you should seriously consider using will include natural asset scalability. An asset is anything that a customer views as a separate piece of information on the screen. Pictures, text, buttons - all of these are separate assets, and all of these assets have the ability to scale naturally with the size of the screen that the customer uses.

Each asset with additional features on mouse holdover should retain those features regardless of size. For instance, navigation bar items with drop down menus must retain their menus regardless of the size of the screen. However, your web designer must make the menu fonts scale at the same rate as the original navigation bar asset to keep the website cohesive.

Sophisticated CSS designers may allow your assets to reorganize themselves if the screen gets so small that text cannot be seen. In some cases, assets that are less important may drop off the screen entirely if the user decides to reduce the display past a certain percentage.

Vertically Elongated Menus

For the most part, horizontal scrolling is panned in the world of responsive web design. People simply prefer vertical scrolling, and this includes menu scrolling.

If your laptop website has any menus that elongate along a horizontal path, they must repurpose themselves as a vertical menu. Many smart phones and tablets do not even allow for vertical scrolling past a certain point, meaning that your website may completely lose a menu item in a worst case scenario. Because the last item is most menus and along navigation bars is usually the conversion action or the sale button, you might imagine how this might negatively affect your business.

Hidden Toggle Menus

Between the choices of hidden toggle menus and on-screen toggle menus, hidden toggle menus seem to have won out. Hidden toggle menus became a trend in the iOS circles, especially those that used native Cocoa libraries for some incredible animations. The idea spread as more web designers found uses for the hidden toggle, and it has become such a normal part of the mainstream web design circuit that it is now the preferred type of menu animation.

There is one weakness to the hidden toggle menu: It relies heavily on Javascript. This may affect your decisions in the short-term, but over the long-term, Javascript will become a more integrated part of mobile design. If you are looking to create a site that will stand, then do not move away from the hidden toggle menu just because the majority of your users have mobile devices that are not yet ready for Javascript. Your web designer can create a fork that directs your customers to a Javascript free mirror if the device does not support the technology.

Please feel free to contact us when you need an online partner focused on time and cost efficiency. Our proprietary development process is based in agile scrum, a process that minimizes all time spent in bulky applications while maximizing value for your web design money.

The classic project management model and the agile model have the same goals. Both want to organize a project and deliver it in a timely fashion, but classic project management and agile development have different ideas about how this process is most effectively achieved. Both approaches recognize that planning is essential if developers are to create a meaningful and responsive product.

Agile development diverges from the classic model in terms of when planning occurs. In the classic model, all planning happens before actual project development begins. Milestones are determined, including the number hours dedicated to achieving specific goals. Likewise scope and features are locked in. The System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) essentially recognizes that the development process is ongoing, that review and maintenance phases will recognize limits in the version under development, which can be implemented in future releases.

The agile approach does not require as much planning up front. Under the agile model, planning is more flexible. This flexibility has both positive and negative potential. On the positive side, changes may be incorporated later in the planning process. This recognizes both the creative capability of programmers as well as the reality that sometimes limitations cannot be seen in all instances prior to the start of the actual development process. These are concepts which are critical to fluid meaningful development, and should not be dismissed lightly.

On the potentially negative side, if the planning phase cannot be said to be definitively completed, it would be possible to 'talk something to death', which is to say, never to move past the planning phase and commit to actual development. This potential is even more of a concern when the development process solicits the input of highly creative individuals.

In the open source arena this can lead to a project 'forking' into different products as schism between personalities over the direction a product should take may eventually lead to breakup of development teams, or the loss of key team members. Such a dramatic segue may be entertaining to read about on open source project chat boards, but it has no place in serious commercial development. Clearly, even though creativity minds should be given a chance to add meaningfully to product development, there must be a line of demarcation where leadership prevents the chaos of uncontrolled egos and creativity.

Scrum is the process which attempts to create and maintain a balance between uncontrolled creative minds and the leadership necessary to drive a product in a stakeholder driven meaningful direction. To provide a brief analogy, picture a hallway with a closed door at the end. Now fill the hallway with cats and attempt to herd them through the doorway. Some will move quickly, some will need to be enticed, other will need to be carried. You will get them all through the doorway in the end, but the process and mechanics will be predictable in concept, unpredictable in practice, and perhaps unattractive or comical to behold. Once all of the cats have been herded through the first door, you close the door firmly, walk down and open the next door, and begin anew to herd your cats toward the second door.

The scrum concept will move all of the team from one stage to the next in similar fashion. It permits individual team members to contribute their own creativity, while at the same time keeping leadership (the scrum master) in a position to close off doors when needed to keep what is essentially a herd of cats manageable. Creative minds want to create, they generally do not want to manage. One of the basic principle of agile development is 'working software over comprehensive documentation', and lack of interest in management principles may be a badge of honor or propriety among developers. Yet management is an inescapable necessity in successful commercial development. Scrum provides the smaller steps necessary to provide distinct milestones without the feeling of micromanagement which can impede creativity and new ideas.

For more information on putting scrum to work for you projects, please contact us.

So you've decided to develop a mobile app. Great choice! As we (and others) have pointed out in plenty of previous blog posts, the rising popularity of smartphones, tablets, and wearables will only make mobile applications more important in coming months and years. We're now past the tipping point in the seemingly endless "mobile vs. desktop" debate, as mobile internet usage surpassed its desktop counterpart for the first time last year.

In other words, it's a great time to get your marketing strategy ready for 2016 by developing a mobile app. But the next step is just as important: picking the right one among the plethora of mobile application development companies to get your app as close to what you want and need as possible. Distinguishing the countless companies out there can be difficult, so we want to help! Here are three distinguishing factors that you should keep in mind when shopping your project around.

1) Agile vs. Waterfall

Just how does the app developer get your app to the finish line? Traditionally, most companies have subscribed to a linear "waterfall" method in which one step is created after the next, with testing being done as the project nears completion. Of course, as you can probably imagine, this method can be too rigid to be successful. For example, you may run into timeline or budget issues that you can do little about once you discover them. At that point, you just have to move forward, knowing that your app will be finished late or over budget.

That's why developers like us have begun to move away from the rigid "waterfall" method and toward a more agile philosophy. In this development process, we break your app project into separate pieces that can be developed at the same time. This allows for increased corporation between the individual designers, coders as well as the client, who can have more input into the development process. Another advantage of agile development is a focus on testing, which can be done throughout the process. This increased flexibility ultimately means a greater chance of finishing a more well-tested app on time, and on budget.

2) Clients vs. Partners

Most developers, like most B2B service providers, follow the strict parameters of an agency-client relationship. You give them the budget and a set of instructions, and they'll (hopefully) deliver the project on time. Communication is kept to status updates.

Of course, this method has several shortfalls. After all, it's in a developer's best interest to create the best product possible, and it can only do so with open two-way communication channels. That's why we believe in a partner relationship with our clients, which includes a more open communication flow as well as the next crucial point:

3) To-Completion vs. Life-Cycle

What happens when your app is finished? Does the developer hand it off, wipe his hands clean and move on to the next client? Probably, but as any mobile marketer knows, the completion point of an app is from its end point. Continuous updates will be necessary as your business expands or changes its offerings, as well as fixing the inevitable bugs that even the greatest amount of testing wasn't able to find.

That's why we strongly believe that in order to build an agency-client relationship that's a close partnership, we want to stay with your business and your app until the end of its lifecycle. That means keeping those communication channels open even after the app is completed, being able to make updates and follow its success for as long as you need.

As you can see, there may be a variety of mobile app development companies out there - but they don't all operate nearly on the same level. So when looking to get your app developed, be sure that you find a developer who matches your preference in terms of agile vs. waterfall, treats you as a partner rather than a client, and is willing to follow your app's entire lifecycle. And if you're ready for just that developer, we'd love to have a word! Contact us to get the conversation started.

Lately, it seems like a custom web app is absolutely necessary to do business online, and even companies that have excellent responsive websites have companion apps. Despite this, very few of these apps live up to their promise. What can you do to ensure that your app will keep people's interest? Here are a few things that will help ensure that your offering won't end up being uninstalled:

1. Keep it relevant. Most companies have caught on to this, but there are still a few that make the mistake of releasing an app that has nothing to do with their main service. An example of this would be a food company that puts out a video game. That may work if children are the target market, but if you cater to adults, you need to keep a tighter focus. The food company in the example would be better off with a cooking app or one that promotes eating the types of food that company sells.

2. Don't just duplicate your site. This is especially true if you have a great adaptive site that offers just as much functionality on the small screen as the app would. This offers no value and will soon find its way to the uninstall list. It's a good idea to offer shopping capabilities if your business involves online buying, but remember that your mobile site is already there to take orders. Your app's main function should be to augment it rather than duplicate it.

3. Come up with something unique. Don't worry if you draw a blank on this one. If you talk to a full-service development company, they should be able to brainstorm with you to devise a new angle. Developers get orders all the time, so they can tell you if an idea is something different or a "yet another X" concept. Developers are also good sources of ideas for methods of presentation and other areas that can be made unique even if the main concept has been done.

4. Don't charge unless you're in the app business. People will pay for apps if they're being sold by app companies, but it's a much different story if your business is something like selling cars. In the latter case, people expect your app to be free and will generally refuse to "pay for your ads."

5. If you are in the app business, avoid saturated concepts. This is basically a matter of supply and demand, but it also ties in with the fact that it's much harder to excel when a market is already full of top-notch competition. Avoid saturated categories unless you have a truly unique concept. Go ahead and commission a custom app that you think could be the next Angry Birds - but avoid copying the one that already exists.

6. Hire an experienced and adaptable developer. This is an essential requirement no matter what you intend your app to do or why you want one. Modern developers can keep up with changing project requirements and use processes that assume that changes will be needed. This is much different from ones who use old-fashioned methods that demanded exact specifications from the start and couldn't accommodate changes midstream. Of course, the value of experience barely needs to be explained. Developers who have plenty of it are the ones who are most likely to deliver a glitch-free product and do so within the estimated time frame.

By keeping these six key factors in mind, you'll increase your chance of being successful with your app. To learn more or discuss having a custom app produced, just contact us. We'll be glad to work with you.