Is Your Website Ready for Smart TV Visitors?
Responsive web design is being taken a notch higher and business owners may need to once again modify the layouts of their online stores to accommodate visitors with multi screen and multi web enabled devices.
Today, users are browsing the web on multiple types of devices such as laptops, desktop PCs, tablets and smart phones. Not to mention from new internet enabled smart devices like exercise bikes, smart TVs and game consoles.
It is not uncommon for consumers to have more than one internet device. In fact, most already do. Some have a laptop for work, a functional desktop PC at home, a smart phone whilst out and about and a smart TV in the living room. Unfortunately, many websites are not considered smart TV friendly.
In order to avoid losing customers, website owners need a responsive web design that considers the way in which the audience will navigate their website and which will work efficiently in devices of varying screen sizes and shapes. According to a Google study, 65% of online shoppers use smart phones whilst about 90% use multiple devices. However, with a growing smart TV audience, business owners will need to consider customers shopping with multi screen devices.
Web site visitors can become frustrated browsing their favourite sites only to discover that it is fully flash dependent, making it unreadable on some internet enabled devices. Also websites designed for desktop browsers can be difficult to navigate on smart phones and other non-traditional web enabled devices.
Fortunately, it is technically possible to direct visitors to different versions of an e-commerce website based on the device they are using. In other words, separating web content from the way it is presented. Images, page content and other elements are stored in a database and when web visitors arrive, the content is retrieved, inserted into a template and rendered to the browser. This ensures an optimum visitor experience whether they are using a desktop PC, smart phone, tablet or smart TV.
