RIABiz launches its redesigned 'responsive' website
After our Terence Hong dismissed the notion of an RIABiz app as so 2012, we go with a go-anywhere technology
3 min read- RIABiz unveils its redesigned website with a responsive design for optimal mobile viewing.
- Mobile usage now accounts for 20% of RIABiz readership, doubling year-over-year.
- Prioritizing user experience, RIABiz avoided a native app in favor of a streamlined website.
- Content-first design drives readership, reaching a new high of 56,750 unique visitors in October.
If you hadn’t noticed until we brought it up, we understand.
But…
After more than two years, untold thousands of dollars and multiple web developers and designers, RIABiz.com is proud to introduce our new website. I don’t believe our current web developer, Terry Hong, has slept for at least 36 hours.
On the surface, the look of RIABiz 3.0 (we skipped 2.0, but more on that later) varies little from the one we started out with and that Nevin Freeman, our chief technologist emeritus, designed in a couple of evenings when he was camping out on the floor of my houseboat.
RIABiz's gentle redesign marks the beginning of Q2
What has changed: RIABiz is now a “responsive” website, which is the lingo for a web design that looks good both on a laptop and a mobile device — with no intervention needed on the user’s part. Right now, the new site isn’t ideal on some mobile devices but we hope that will be fixed by Monday.
By humans, for humans
Story Timeline
RIABiz is now viewed 20% of the time from mobile devices, a doubling from this time last year. That seems to be just ahead of web usage figures globally showing that browser usage happened 17.3% on a mobile device as of July 2013, up from 11.09% as of July 2012. It was 7% in July of 2011, according to the W3 website.
The photos RIABiz runs on top of the site in boxes — the ones with the devilishly clever teasers — have still yet to reappear. That carousel is being manufactured in a separate warehouse and will be plunked in the chassis like the a Rolls Royce engine into a fighter jet. Something like that.
We have actually had web designers suggest that we nix them entirely. We overrode the experts’ opinions because we are determined to signal the importance we place on human beings, so we start there. The idea’s muse was the once-best trade-blog-type-online-pub,TechCrunch, which has devolved from its own signature design into yet another busy, dizzying experience on the webscape of look-at-me online arm-waving.
Hard to be easy
What we chose not to do was to ever have a RIABiz 2.0, or what is known as a “native” app. What Terry taught us was that an app is really something most appropriate for applications that need to leverage the user’s hardware – think demanding 3D games, the various 'snap or 'gram apps, etc.. Presenting articles on a page just doesn’t, he explains, require such heavy artillery. Better yet, we don’t need to ask readers to download an app. Who needs more junk DNA contaminating their pristine hard drives?
Most of what we learned in our revamp was that Nevin’s original idea of putting content first and keeping it simple is difficult to improve upon. This time we had to pay for it in time and resources as we contemplated more “sophisticated” looks and then realized that simplicity is not improvable. Our latest readership stats bear that out. In October we had 56,750 unique visitors, a new monthly high and up 10% from September.
If we just get out of the way, we hope the fireworks go off in readers’ entrepreneurial minds.
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