diginomica - the mobile story so far
- Summary:
- A diginomica half term report delivered to EuroCloud. We talk about results so far and ongoing challenges.
As I wound down my seven week road trip in the US, David Terrar of D2C asked if I would do a presentation to the EuroCloud crowd in London this week.
At first I said no but then travel plans changed and the slot opened up. I'm not a fan of blowing one's own trumpet but I did welcome the opportunity of talking about responsive design as this is a key attribute of our site design. I was also keen to share some stats and talk to the challenges we face. Why?
I've long held the view that the best case studies are those that share the good, the bad and the indifferent. In this case, we were being pitched as a 'user' organization. Therefore, if I was going to do any form of presentation then it was important that I demonstrate how we eat our own dog food.
The above Slideshare tells the story in lots of pictures and few words. Here are selected slide notes:
6. We started as a distributed business and as we add people, we become even more distributed
7. Trip data - actually out of date but indicative of how mobile we have to be
8. The reality of operating across different countries in terms of the devices I need to carry in order to optimize communications costs
9. The ah-ha moment when the genesis of what diginomica might be popped into my mind.
10. Setting out the constraints under which we wished to design helps maintain focus. Going with as many off the shelf components as possible allowed for a fast track and cost effective build.
14. That was the date when I realized that unless I cut all ties to past editorial work then diginomica would not reach its potential. In short, it is possible to build all manner of lifestyle businesses these days but if you want to be taken seriously then you have to devote yourself to the endeavor.
16. At one point, we had around 100 people involved in UAT. It was a sobering experience.
19. Our decision to go 'mobile first' has been justified. We consistently see around 25% of all traffic coming from those devices. If we had not thought this through early on then retrofitting would have been a nightmare.
20. SPARE - an acronym that aptly describes the challenges we face. It turns out these are common issues.
One thing I forgot to share. We make changes pretty much every week. Whether it is upgrading plugins, running optimizations or bug hunting, the work never ends. We do all these while in flight and have never had to bring the site down to make changes. Oh yes - and occasionally, things DO break.
After my session, the organizers did a Q&A during which several topics dear to my heart came up including new marketing (not being done well IMO), the cloud switch for financial applications (will happen sooner than people think,) and the question of building compelling content (much harder than it seems.)
Afterwards, I was offered the opportunity to get help streamlining the code we run. What a nice way to end a session.
Thanks to the EuroCloud organizers for the opportunity to share what we've done and learned over the last year and the last seven months of live production.
Bonus points: Why your business needs a responsive website before 2014, via John Moy