Ever since I have started to work at the marketing team of the MobiAccess division, I’ve been trying to push the limits of our web presence. I took the challenge to redesign our entire website in about two weeks.
While this might sound simple enough, I have made some bold decisions which involved completely ditching the Joomla CRM system. We realized that we simply don’t need the flexibility of Joomla. It is something like buying a whole toolkit box while you only need a single screwdriver. I have completely rewritten the underlying code, which is just enough to run our website, yet flexible to future-proof ourselves, so that we can implement new features easily. We have also integrated a stripped-down version of the WordPress blogging service, which provides the less tech-savvy employees of the company an interface to add or edit new posts to the blog or news section of the website. There were also some non-trivial tasks such as migrating all of the Joomla users, figuring out the way it hashes passwords, and creating a custom newsletter sending software to fit our needs.
The part which has never really changed, is the content. It is clear to me, that we have to give up with the information overload on our users. While it might be useful to find much-much information about our products, we need to simplify. Now, I’m not saying that we should deliberately erase already existing, and probably useful information. What I’m saying is that we should hide 80% of the content which is only consumed by about 20% of our visitors, shrink the remaining, and embody the things we really want to say. If a visitor spends about 5-6 minutes on our website – which is actually a pretty good value – it is necessary not to bore them with highly technical and deep content. 5-6 minutes is not even enough to read and really process the textual information on our main product pages. If you have a 5-minute sales pitch, you shouldn’t start with server requirements and API functions.
Also, as our attention shifted over time from just the framework used by developers to a much broader range of services and products, it was apparent that we have to restructure our site, simply because key areas of the site was made to serve and advertise the Development Framework. Which brings me to the next task on our list, which is organization. We quickly became aware of the problems of our current way to organize products, solutions, and services. There are things that simply don’t fit anywhere, so we needed a new main level menu item, which leads to the problem of too many menu items, or worse, things get posted where they don’t belong. I think we are on the right track to make our offerings more organized. Again, it is necessary to hide the things which are rarely used, and make new categories. In the new menu system, we have duplicated a typical product lifecycle from the perspective of the user; gathering information – trying out, and purchase – support. We further broke down categories so it is easy find what you most probably need in a matter of two clicks of the mouse.
From left-to-right, you can see how our main page progressed. Last time we were focusing on improving the design. This resulted much content behind the browser fold, leaving them almost invisible since users rarely scroll down. So this time, we are focusing on design and usability.
Product page before – Product page after. Now, it is easy to see the results. The same product page is much more friendlier with relevant images and bite-sized chunks of texts, while offering a white paper download for those who are really interested in technical details. There are many important details of designing a clean layout like pixel-perfect content separators, and the simple fact of not using justified text, which improves a lot on text scannability.
I believe the coming changes on our website will bring a huge improvement at the end of the day. We need to communicate our strengths and to stay ahead the curve by using search-engine friendly, modern, widely supported CSS and JavaScript solutions. I could literally go on and on to detail how we reduce bandwidth consumption, about neat CSS and JQuery tricks and how to satisfy our international users by researching and switching hosting providers.
I hope this article provides a good sneak peak of the shape of things to come – trust me, there are many.