Over the weekend a top Yorkshire tourist attraction announced via it’s Facebook page that it now offers Holiday Cottages which are available to book for 2015. Having previously been interested in the attraction and starting to do more staycations I thought I’d take a look…

Why? The website wasn’t optimised for visitors using a mobile or tablet.

Considering how mobile traffic accounted for 31% of all website visits in Q4 2013 and for a business who clearly undertakes the majority of its marketing activity via Social Media channels, they clearly haven’t been given the correct advice on the type of website that will fit best with their overall marketing requirements. Either that or they were and they choose not to take on board the advice.

As the attraction has been trading for a number of years and already has an e-commerce site they will or at least should have Google Analytics set up to identify how much of its traffic comes from mobile devices and will, therefore be able to measure how it has increased over the years.

The e-commerce site fares slightly better but could still be significantly improved (there’s lots of zooming in required – especially on the menus). With the new site they had the perfect opportunity to experiment with a fully optimised site for the holiday cottages and in turn the results would have spoken for themselves.

I’ve now had to visit the site using my MacBook – it is a very beautiful site, clean, clear imagery, intuitive navigation and even a customer login area. It has the bones to be a site that delivers results but it ultimately needs to be optimised for mobile and tablet to withstand both the immediate and future requirements of its audience.

So, if you are considering developing a website or you have one already, here are a few things to consider to ensure excellent mobile optimisation.

  1. Use historic data to identify where your traffic comes from (where available)
  2. Consider how you market or plan to market – if the majority is online, you need a site that works on all devices.
  3. Research trends
  4. Research your competition
  5. Speak with both web developers and marketeers – both will offer a variety of insights

Sources:

http://www.walkersands.com/Walker-Sands-Mobile-Traffic-Report-Q4-2013

http://www.tnooz.com/article/show-these-mobile-usage-stats-to-any-travel-executive-resisting-change/

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