New ActiveRain Mobile Optimized Website Design
Save the best for last. Check out the last few minutes of the video. It mentions that there are upcoming changes for content creation on mobile devices. Let's hope this means photo insertion on blog posts written via an iPad. I'm anxious to check out my posts on an iPad tomorrow to see the new changes!
On Monday night, September 29th at 9pm (Pacific Time) we will be launching the new ActiveRain Mobile optimized design for the website.
What does this mean? It means that ActiveRain will now render much better on a mobile device giving any visitors via mobile a more delightful and beautiful experience where the author (you!) is front and center.
Currently, about 20% of the traffic that comes to ActiveRain is doing so via a mobile device. This number has been steadily increasing month after month. This new optimized design will create a better experience for those visitors.
We believe that creating a mobile optimized design that will display your content in a visually appealing and consistent manner from device to device (and there are a ton of devices, not to mention operating systems to consider) will help your content rank better when someone is doing a Google search (or any other search engine) from their mobile phone and thereby lead to more traffic for your blog posts.
Combined with obvious calls to action and placing you and the ability to contact you front and center we hope this new design leads to more connections through your blog.
What Did We Do:
Made Your Blog Beautiful: Well really we just took what you are posting to the desktop version of ActiveRain and made it so that it looks good on a mobile device. Lots of developer stuff like resizing images and eliminating random code that doesn't display so well on mobile
Put The Author Front and Center: Any time someone lands on a piece of content you authored using their mobile device, it's no secret who wrote the content. We put your pretty face front and center and made sure there are ample options for someone to connect with you.
Clear Calls to Action: Did I just repeat myself? It bears repeating.....there are lots of ways on a mobile version of your post for someone to reach out and connect with you.
How This Benefits You, The Members of ActiveRain:
The new mobile optimized site allows our members to engage on ActiveRain from your mobile device. You can now comment on posts, like other member's blog posts or comments and access your bookmarks.
Beyond that, we believe that offering up a mobile optimized site to Google, as I mentioned earlier, will increase the likelihood that your content shows up higher in search results served up to someone using a mobile device.
What Should You Do on Tuesday Morning, September 30th?The first thing you want to do is check out one of your blog posts on your mobile device. Pay special attention to the name field when you post pulls up. You'll want to make sure that you are using the fields in your ActiveRain profile in the way they are intended to be used. If you have been stuffing a bunch of extra stuff into, say, your name field.....it's not going to look as good on the mobile version.
Second, play around with it. Get in there and comment, like a few posts, check out your bookmarks and just play around on AR using your mobile device.
Coming Up Monday September 29thIf you would like to get a sneak peek of what the new mobile optimized site will look like, check out the video I created below showing it off a little bit.
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Keep Up In the Rain!
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