Design Matters: Why a Responsive Website is a Must-Have Communications Tool, by Jared Dovers, WordSouth
Design matters: Why a responsive website is a must-have communications tool
By Jared Dovers, VP, Electric Division, WordSouth
For electric distributors, a website should serve as a branch office that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your customers should be able to find the information they need as well as perform most of the functions they could if they were standing in front of a customer service representative. This means paying their bill, applying for service and more.
Your website also needs to meet customers wherever they are. Increasingly, that means on a smartphone or tablet. According to the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 own a smartphone. Much of your interaction with this age group will be over the Web, and most likely on a phone screen.
The screen size and the way a user interacts with the device (keyboard or gesture) have a tremendous impact on usability. To ensure a quality user experience your website needs to be "responsive." Responsive sites are coded in a such a way that they display information on a 20-inch screen differently than on a 4-inch screen. They are also built from the ground up to be usable with different inputs.
For example, does your website have a menu that drops down if the mouse hovers over it? Many do. The problem here is that there is no such thing as hovering on a smartphone. If your website is not coded correctly, users may not be seeing the same information on their phones as they do on a desktop. And that means your website is not serving your customers as well as it could be.
After April of this year, investing in a responsive website has another benefit. To better serve the millions who use its search engine, Google has started penalizing websites that are not mobile responsive. If your website does not offer a mobile experience, Google will now place other websites above yours in search results. With predatory third-party payment sites becoming more popular, this could be harmful for your customers.
Want to know if your site passes Google’s test? Head to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly and test your site. If your website fails the test, speak with your Web developer about what can be done to make sure your utility is getting the most out of your 24/7 branch office.
Jared Dovers is VP, Electric Division, of WordSouth — A Content Marketing Company, serving electric and telecommunications providers since 1996. Jared can be reached at jared@wordsouth.com.