With the big upsurge in the use of mobile devices to browse and make purchases it is essential for any business to offer a good user experience to these devices. It is NOT sufficient to just show a website that has been designed for a large desktop or laptop screen on these devices. All too often these are just not usable as the text is scaled so small it is not readable and when you try and click a button you often click something else as they are too small.

Saying the above is easy for a web design company but becomes a big burden for small businesses that need to get on with the business rather than administering a website.

If you have a bespoke website designed and created for you then the year on year costs are going to be high as you will need to engage with the design company to make adjustments. By far the best way is to go with one of the many frameworks  available as these are maintained and updated for you as technologies move on, leaving you to focus on the content and not the technology.

By far the biggest framework is WordPress. WordPress has 1000′s of plugins and themes available of which some are free and some are commercial but in most cases are significantly cheaper than engaging a developer to create something. One of the big WordPress plugin and theme companies is WPMU Dev that offer well supported plugins and themes.

If you need any advice on your website and in particular WordPress please get in touch.

The website has been designed to be responsive to the device (PC, laptop, tablet, smart phone) being used.

Other key elements are a map that knows where you are, improved navigation system, improved performance, new business listing management area.

To coincide with the launch Coast Radar has launched a Social Media campaign making use of re-vamped facebook, twitter (@coastradar) and blog pages.

Coast Radar was faced with a problem that many other websites are also struggling with. The whole idea that visitors are using different sized devices and expect a tailored experience. At first we worked on a main website, mobile website and iphone application but this just became too expensive and complicated to keep in sync.

After listening to what the users were saying we decided on a completely new version of the website.

The beta is a mechanism where we can share our new vision and still have time to take on-board people’s comments.

At a high level the changes of the new website are:

• Clearer navigation outside of maps.
      We have provided a new text link navigation system where you start at a continent, then look at countries, then states, then actual listings.
• People who enter at a beach listing from the search engine said it is long winded to see other elements close by.
      We have added a breadcrumb at the top of a page labelled “You are at :: ” where the green parts are links to allow you to easily move backwards and forwards. This means you can easily move up from an entry to the region, from a region to the country, etc.
• People only want to be told about the area they are looking at rather than maps of the world with 1000′s of markers.
      We have changed the whole site to show information based on the context. For example, if you are looking at The United Kingdom you will see the regions/states, where as if you are looking at a state you will see the listings within it.
• People want a mechanism whereas they can ask businesses and other people for advice on a coastal area.
      We have expanded the community to provide a full social environment where people can freely ask questions and share experiences.
• People wanted a mechanism to plan plan and record a trip.
  We have allowed FREE travel Blogs within the community to plan, record and share a trip.
• People want a single website to map to the device they are using, a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and don’t want to have to swap between mobile, desktop and mobile application versions.
      This was a complete re-design to provide a responsive website that adapts to the screen size being used. We will discontinue our iphone and mobile website versions.
• Businesses wanted a mechanism to communicate with other businesses and people interested in the coast.
  The new community website allows people to discuss topics within what we calls groups. Groups can be PUBLIC – open to everyone, PRIVATE – people have to request membership of the group Admin or HIDDEN where people have top be invited. Anyone can start a group.
  
• People wanted a faster site.
  Although the beta does not use it, when the new website goes live it will use an international Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide faster access to content.

Why not go and have a play at beta.coastradar.com

Technology wise, the main website is a custom HTML 5 fluid design and the community makes use of WordPress and Buddypress.

Any questions then just drop us an email or give us a call at +44 (0)20 8123 8159

The Coast Radar mobile website version 1 has been launched today and can be seen at www.coastradar.mobi

The site works by discovering the current position and then displaying listings based on this location, listings currently cover the Beach Guide, Things to Do Guide, Shopping Guide and Places to Eat Guide from the main website. The site tries to adapt the various screen sizes from the 10 inch iPad to the much smaller mobile phones. With iPad/iPhones it supports the save to home page with icon and splash page.

If you want to search for locations rather than look from your current position you will have to use the main desktop website at www.coastradar.com, although we are looking to add this to version 2 later in the summer.

Give it a try, comments and improvement suggestions to the Coast Radar face book page (facebook/coastradar) or twitter (@coastradar).

We will sit down with you in front of your website and generally walk through it and answer any of your concerns.

So if your business is local in towns like Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, Tring, Aylesbury, Chesham, Amersham, St. Albans, Watford, Wendover or even as far as Milton Keynes just send a message on our contact us form or give us a call.

If you are further afield or you represent a trading body or business group then by all means contact us and we will see what we can do.

Some of the questions already asked include:
- my website looks dated, any ideas?
- how can I get more control over my website content and not always have to pay for changes?
- what does SEO mean to me?
- website review please?
- keyword selection tips?
- am I spending enough or too much on pay per click advertising?
- should I concentrate on local search?

As you can see we have covered and helped a lot of businesses. Again, no obligation to purchase anything.

If you’d like to know more, call us today on 020 8123 8159.

Praeparo thinks this is a good idea as we all should be creating a good user experience. Page load time is critical in a user experience as if we can’t convince the user the site is good in a few seconds they will just bounce.

The only area of concern is that some sites to create a good user experience are rich in content that slows the page down. This is acknowledged and accepted by the users BUT how will Google handle this? In this case we should just accept that these pages will not rank so high and thus create other more focused landing pages that then direct to the slower pages for more information.

Very important for all website owners to evaluate page speed and create an action plan to rectify any pain points. This does not have to be expensive, we suggest find the quick wins and make any changes as part of your usual maintenance or content refresh processes.

But remember DON’T PANIC as content is still the leading factor. Page speed is only a very small element of the overall ranking algorithms.

If you have concerns please get in touch with Praeparo and we can quickly help you find out if you have a problem or not.

This technically works but loses you points in the search engine optimisation game. Thus, it is much better to have a human understandable URL, for example www.mydomain.com/menswear/jumpers

However, this can create problems where the same end page can be reached through multiple navigation paths. This can result in what the search engine sees as duplicate content. A search engine flags duplicate content when it sees the same content at more than one URL.

You need to have a careful naming strategy to ensure this does not happen. For example in an ecommerce web site:

Categories: www.mydomain.com/category

Subcategories: www.mydomain.com/category/subcategory

Products: www.mydomain.com/products

The key element of the above strategy is that the products are not listed under categories. This means that if multiple categories have the same product they will point at the ONE product page, helping with much valued internal links.

The example above refers to an ecommerce site like oscommerce or OSCMax but the problem can also occur in blogging software like WordPress or web site builder packages.

Praeparo can work with you and help you understand the correct strategies for your web site and also help with an implementation plan that will have limited risk on your current search engine rankings.

Click here to read full press release!

The new website allows travelers to quickly and easily “Discover the Shoreline” with a very focused and relevant search based on visitor reviews. Coast Radar provides a full Beach Guide, a complete Weather Station, an Activity Guide, Kit Bag and full list of Services and Accommodations.

The Beach Guide features an online search locating beaches by region or by map. It also offers the top 10 beaches and allows users to suggest a beach. The Weather Station offers current weather conditions, the previous day’s highs and lows and the precipitation forecast. The Activity Guide helps travelers find things to do on the coast ranging from leisurely walks and hikes to surfing and sailing. The Kit Bag helps visitors locate shops for all their travel accessory needs. The Services Guide provides a list of schools, instructors and guides and the Accommodation Guide provides a list of friendly places to stay near the beach of choice.

There are several ways to search using the website. The “Quick Jump” takes users straight to a Google Map of a specific location. Users can also browse through maps based on categories of Beach, Activities, Kit Bag, Services and Accommodations; or users can browse through a region and narrow the search by selecting text links.

Coast Radar gathers its information based on visitor submissions. The site also offers business listings for local area businesses to advertise a service, shop or accommodation. While the site is currently focused on the UK, other coastal regions will soon be added to the site.

For further information, or to “Discover the Shoreline,” please visit www.coastradar.com

The first step is consider what type of online presence you want, these fall roughly into 5 categories although a number of websites do offer more than one.

1. e-commerce:
   provision of products available to purchase online.
2. information:
   typically help to generate offline sales of services by providing information.
3. brand:
   focus is to support your brand.
4. portal:
   provision of news and information around a range of topics.
5. social networks or community:
   enables community interactions between different consumers.

All these categories influence in slightly different ways when it comes to website design, development, website launch, operational ongoing costs and marketing. For example, a brand building site needs less monthly work than an e-commerce or portal site which depend on fresh updated information.

The thinking is that if any task takes more than 3 clicks to complete, a visitor will not complete the task. It is one of the oldest pillars of website usability design.

So is it over emphasised?

Although the 3-click rule can make you think about your page hierarchy we believe it is only one of the items you need to consider. Yes if you have a step of tasks then you should be limiting the number of clicks but the major rule is design to what the user wants and expects.

You must consider and provide:

• Detailed search to enable people to jump to what they are looking for.
• Common menu system on every page so that they always know how to get somewhere.
• Keep the pages simple. Visitors will not detail read they will first scan the page looking for key items like headings, links, bold text etc.  Only if it is interesting will they then go through back in more detail.
• Get a balance of pictures/images and text. Too many of one or the other will put people off. Images should be used to enhance content and not replace as now people too often associate images with banner advertising of which more and more people ignore.
• Search engine optimisation. You need to design for the visitor with search engines in mind and not the other way around. A high bounce rate in Google Analytics indicates the wrong balance in that people are finding you but the content is not relevant.

In Summary

Yes the 3-Click rule is relevant but not in isolation. You must consider all elements of website design and find the correct balance between them.