My good friend Desiree Scales, social marketing and web design expert, just posted this on her website www.thebellabuzz.com. I thought this was especially interesting for the fertility community since patients and potential patients are changing (yet again!) the way they seek information and locate fertility-related services. I think these are some very important issues to consider as we update our own websites and improve oru communication with the public. It's always best to be ahead of the curve.
Let me know what you think and as always, let us know if there is anything My Fertility Plan can to to help you better connect with patients. As professional patient educators, we are here to help! Email me at [email protected]
------------
As I was reading an article this morning on my iPad a CNN article popped up about “How the iPad Changed 2010.” There was a statement about how the iPad is actually changing how websites are designed. This couldn’t be more true from what I’ve personally seen with our own client sites this year. I thought I would expand on this idea. Here’s what I’m seeing:
Flash is dead (until they reinvent it). Flash is no longer considered a web compliant medium. If you have flash on your site, the iPad and iPhone will not show it. You’ll end up with a site that has empty space where the animation should be. Worse, if your whole site is in Flash, it will be completely invisible and no navigation will render the site useless.
Websites will look more like apps. This is already happening to sites you visit on a regular basis. Look at Twitter’s recent major design transformation on an iPad or iPhone and you’ll see what I mean. The whole site looks like an application and is even better than it’s official iPad app, in my opinion. On the other hand, apps are designed more like the websites they represent. It’s all a matter of branding. Branding should be consistent including colors, logos and layout between both an app and its website.
Navigation is widgetized. If you look at an iPad application, you know exactly which buttons to push to get to where you need to go. Same with websites being designed to work on these platforms. There are more sections of information with larger buttons to get you where you need to go on websites which are iPad compliant. No more little text links to deal with which are hard to navigate with large fingers.
Video is sexy, images are beautiful. Site owners are investing in tools which will enable them to create HD video and images to set their site apart from the pack. Everyone knows it’s the images that really make a website shine. If your images are blurred, don’t kill your chances of making a good impression. Delete ‘em! Video will also continue to make strides on sites as it is a natural on the iPad and iPhone. A professional video on your site will impress more visitors than just plain text. If you can speak the words, why not videotape them being spoken by a company representative, or better yet, the owner? It will make a much more lasting impression.
So my question to you is, have you viewed your site on an iPad or iPhone yet? Are you afraid to see what you might find? I would encourage those who don’t own these devices to go to the Apple store and take a look. Why should you care? Over 9 million iPhones have been sold and this holiday season looks to add millions more to the 6 million iPads already out there. The most important marketing real estate right now is the mobile platform. If your own site doesn’t represent your company well on all popular platforms, you might think about hiring someone who can can change that. (You might also look into creating an application that can further help your customers, but that’s another blog post forthcoming. Stay tuned!)