Mobile

Best Practices of Mobile Website Usability in the Hospitality Industry

April 11, 2012 by 1BlizzAdmin

The key to ensuring a positive user experience for your guests on your hotel, resort or vacation rental mobile site is to simplify and streamline. Smart phone users are often on the go and are looking to quickly and easily complete their goal. Ask yourself, “What goals would my guests like to complete on my mobile site?” Is it to book a stay on the mobile site? Is it to call in to book a stay? Or is it simply to improve their stay by having easy access to relevant information?

More often than not the mobile user on a hospitality site is looking for your contact information. This could be a phone number to call for booking or other information, or this could be a physical address to use to navigate to your site. The number one rule for hospitality mobile sites:

Have your address and phone number boldly displayed on every page of your mobile site and make sure it they are clickable!

Next, since this is not every mobile user’s goal, there are a few more important usability rules to follow. Whatever your guests are looking to accomplish, the first step is to make all goals easier to achieve by cutting down as much excess media and content as possible. Make sure you provide enough content to support your goals but don’t overload the site. Keep in mind while designing your mobile site: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Mobile, SEM

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

September 9, 2011 by 1BlizzAdmin

If you haven’t noticed, people really like to use their cell phones.

Whether it’s emailing, video chatting, finding directions, or wording with friends, there are very few things that you can’t do on a cell phone and very few people who could live without it. (Is there a support group for that? I should probably find one.)

As cell phones have become more advanced surfing online has become easier to do as well. Consequently there has been large and steady increase in mobile users visiting websites.

In July and August, 2011, the average lodging website received 10% of its traffic via a mobile device, and during the same months in 2010 that was only 4%.

Here is a chart from BlizzardTracker showing this growth in mobile visitors over the past year:

During August, 2011, the average lodging website (based on 190 websites) received:

4,759 visits from mobile users
Over 13,000 page views
A length of visit of nearly 4 minutes

Whether you do or not, people are searching on their phone for lodging options. If your site doesn’t work well on a mobile browser, visitors will get annoyed and go to your competitor’s site.

You don’t necessarily need a full functioning site, but you do need something to satisfy 10% of your traffic.

Have you checked your site lately?

How well does it work in a mobile browser?