• Read more about Mobile Strategy: Website Or Application?

Every company should have a mobile strategy but first you need to decide what's right for your business - a mobile application or a responsive website? Sometimes companies have one or the other or they may have both. This is all depending on the company and how they reach their users.

Some businesses have to choose between a mobile website or a mobile app based on their budget, let's discuss the pros and cons so that you can make the most educated decision whenever you're deciding on your mobile strategy. 

Mobile Website

Reach: Probably the biggest  benefit the mobile website has over a mobile app is the amount of reach you have; you’re able to access a much larger audience because of its discoverability and marketing potential, and it has low barriers to entry.

Content Sharing: If your primary goal is content consumption, a mobile website will usually suffice. While apps have the ability to make content sharing easy with a great design, a website can do these things with less overhead.

Ships Fast: Generally, obtaining an model view presenter (MVP) for a website requires less resources than launching a mobile app.

Marketing: Marketing a mobile website is easier and more effective than marketing a mobile application. Two tactics in particular work very well with website: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Some disadvantages are:

Functionality: Products with singular functions are generally better delivered via a mobile application than a mobile website. If you think of calendars or email, Uber or Instagram, you'll likely agree that these functions are more effectively delivered through mobile applications than a mobile website.

Mobile Application

User Experience: The biggest benefit of a mobile app is the rich experience it delivers. Think of the UX on Facebook, Spotify, and some of your other favorite apps. Chances are the experience on the mobile application version is much more satisfying than their website versions.

Stand alone services: Applications are ideal for products that offer stand alone services. Weather, health, and banking apps all provide singular services to the user.

Re-engagement: While marketing an application via App Store Optimization is not very effective, apps offer push notifications. Push notifications are a great way to call the user to act even when they’re not actively engaged with your brand or product.

Some of the disadvantages are:

Storage: There is a limited amount of space on a user’s phone and your app is taking up some of that valuable real estate, I think we can all say we’ve seen the message “Storage Full”. When a user gets that message, they are then forced to decide whether or not to keep the app. Generally, apps get deleted before photos, emails, or other personalized storage.                                                                                                                                                                            

Best of Both Worlds

If you’re unsure which route to take (and you don’t have the budget for two builds), then Progressive Web Apps are a great alternative.

By combining the best of the web and the best of app, Progressive Web Apps maintain a website’s far reach and an app’s exceptional UX. Some of the benefits:

If you have questions about which mobile strategy is right for you, feel free to reach out to us! If you’d like to learn more about some of the mobile strategies we’ve put into place, check out the mobile apps and responsive websites we’ve developed.

• Read more about How To Create A New Website: Part 2

In our last post on developing a new website, we went over some basic questions that your web and mobile development company should be asking before starting the process of your website redesign. Once those questions are answered your project manager has a better idea of your end goals and how you see the direction of the new site. So what’s next?

Identify:

Identify the key people who will be affected by the project. Start clarifying exactly who the project’s owner is. This may be an internal or external person of the client. Either way, it is essential to know who has the final say and what will be included in the project’s scope and what will not be included.

Once we establish who will be involved on the client side, we set up weekly meetings. During the meetings we set the agenda so that we are not wasting their time or ours. During the weekly meetings we review the ongoing project tasks and reprioritize items if necessary during this time.

Plan:

We start the process of creating a new website by scheduling a meeting with the web designers and developers. During this meeting we clearly communicate what the client expects and the end goals of the project, this makes it easier for us to decipher our weekly sprints. While keeping in mind user experience, visual design, and mobile first design we discuss action items such as mood board work sessions, style tiles, prototype application features, creating visual style guides, data visualization designs, and usability testing.

Build:

This is when we start building prototypes and mockups and establishing a basic application flow. During this process we are keeping constant communication with the client during the project life-cycle. Your website will not only be aligned with your business needs, but users will be able to find the information they need quickly and easily. We implement a responsive design at this point of the project cycle, this is vital because we are in the age of the mobile device, it is almost guaranteed that your website will be accessed from desktop, tablet, and smartphone. Your responsive site will provide the best user experience across devices – and it will be 508 compliant. Visit USA.gov or NASA.gov to see some of our work.

Risks:

Risk is the possibility of an event or condition that if it occurred, would have a negative impact on a project. After a project begins, events that are difficult to anticipate might create new risks. For example, unseasonably rainy weather might threaten the end date of a construction project. Planning for, identifying, and reducing risk at various times during a project can help you to keep the project on schedule and within budget.

• Read more about Part 1: How To Create A New Website

Creating a new website isn’t always as simple as snapping your fingers. You can create a basic website that will give you basic results; however, there are many questions to answer if you hope to optimize its performance. In this series, we'll discuss how to create a new website.

As a project manager it is important that you are asking important questions before you start designing a website. It’s vital to ask questions around the client's goals, internal philosophy and how they envision their end product. Bottom line, you want to know as much about what their business and their end goals before you even start thinking about design.

Below are sample questions along with a few explanations that I ask a client before starting the project:

A website designed to appeal to 30-something professionals is going to be different than one aimed at young newlyweds or retirees. It’s important that you have a good grasp on who your client’s customers are. It affects not only the look and feel of the site, but may also affect usability and accessibility issues

Finding out a client's budget before the project begins is vital, what if their budget does not match what you designed? You have not only wasted time but money is the most important.

It is important to let the client know that a website or an application is a process and not only a project. Will be necessary to put significative budget for maintenance phase in order to keep the project constantly updated.

The project will be complete once it becomes live. Preparing a site for going live is a combination of choices made before the project starts. It is important to focus on tracking performance, using an according methodology and prioritize items.

It is a good practice to know what the client will want to do in the future with their site in order we can make allowances in the design and coding now. This practice allows us to think in advance to avoid a possible site rebuild from scratch.

This is important because you want a client to be able to track their success after the launch of the site.

These are just suggestions, but if your web development company did not ask you some of these questions, you should probably follow up to make sure they have the right vision for your company.

• Read more about Why are Large Retailer Websites Impossible to Navigate?

The other night my wife was browsing the GAP(gap.com) website, itching to spend her “gap bucks”. She asked if I needed anything and as I browsed through the site looking at clothes I didn’t need, but maybe wanted, I found a constant, frustrating theme throughout…this site was not designed for anyone to actually use. Let me clarify below…

In The Beginning…

Let’s start at the beginning of any website, the homepage. It seems that on many large retail sites immediately upon landing you are bombarded with the latest trends in e-commerce sites, a full page interstitial takeover, begging you sign up for their newsletter for an extra XX% off your purchase.

After dismissing the popup you are able to actually land on the homepage, though almost wishing the popup would return, so there was a clear message or action to take. The sheer amount of available options is overwhelming. I wasn’t sure when looking at the homepage, if GAP wanted me to:

Since I am a professional designer but also a user, when I go to a clothing site to purchase something, that’s all I want to do…purchase that item. I hope that retailer websites such as GAP improves their site so it's easier to navigate, because who doesn't love a good sweater or pair or pants from GAP?

On the flip side I do understand the need from a marketing perspective to answer consumer needs and questions that may relate to the aforementioned list. But surely there is an alternative approach to providing people that info.

Perhaps as someone goes through the shopping experience you can lay these bits of content out in appropriate spots. How about when I add an item to my cart? Why not present me with a coupon option then. Or maybe offer me recommendations of other brand items I might like after the checkout process, perhaps on a thank you screen or in my email confirmation. Crafting a breadcrumb trail like this, and targeting people to take action at the right time, could inevitably lead to more e-commerce sales.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter though, because design at it’s core is about solving problems. And if GAP has found that the way their site is structured solves the problems of their users, that’s all that matters.

• Read more about Capitalizing Apple Products in Ruby (and more)

I've been doing a bit more Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding lately by virtue of silently commandeering the Intridea.com codebase. shhhh, it can be our secret.

Riding the Pipeline of Assets

Last month I upgraded the site from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.1; getting up and running on the asset pipeline was a much larger project than I imagined, and while I had plans for a supremely awesome post on all the details of the upgrade, I spent less time taking notes on all the cute little steps and more time... LOST IN TIME AND SPACE with all the.... complications. #ahem

This week I got the site running on Rails 3.2, which thankfully was pretty easy. The instructions on RubyonRails.org were succinct and helpful. I did run into a few minor hiccups but overall it was a breeze. The biggest problem I ran into was one involving Rack 1.4.1 and cookies. For a view of the crime scene, check the gist.

A quick search on StackOverflow told me a lot of others were having this issue as well, but a simple act of clearing cookies fixed their problem. It wasn't so easy in my case. In the end I had to rollback to Rack 1.4.0, but I've got my fingers crossed for a fix in some future release.

i to the P

With Rails upgrades out of the way, I am focusing on smaller enhancements here and there as time permits. This week I added a helper file for our blog categories. These categories are generated dynamically based on the popularity/density of tags in blog posts (thanks to Michael Bleigh's Acts As Taggable On gem), but I wanted to capitalize the category names and appropriately not capitalize the "i" in words like "iPhone" and "iPad" and consequently capitalize the second letter in those specific words. It's not rocket science, but if you are upper-casing words in your app and want to create exceptions for Apple products, here's some code for you:

module TagHelper   def tag_title(tag)     name = tag.name.downcase     iProduct = %w(iphone ipad)     if iProduct.include?(name)       apple_product_titlize(name)     else       name.capitalize     end   end    def apple_product_titlize(name)     name[0] + name[1].capitalize + name[2..-1]   end end 

This method is called by a bit of Ruby in our view:

<% @categories.each do |tag| %>   <li><%= link_to "#{tag_title(tag)} (#{tag.count})", "/tag/#{tag.name}" %></li> <% end %> 

The Before & After

Updates? Yeah, we do that

So there you have it - a long overdue update on intridea.com upgrades and a snippet of code to help you manage the "i" pandemic.

Happy coding!