Introducing Our New Mobile Menu System

Some Background Stories

When our search traffic dropped for about 50% in Jan this year, we begun to suspect that Google had already incorporated, some if not all, of their mobile-friendly factors into their search ranking algorithm -- although they just recently announced that this is going to be "official" in April 2015. But how did we discover that?

In early Feb 2015, we started to make some quick investigation based on common sense:

1. Based on Google Analytics, out of our total all time visitors, 83% are desktop users (Windows, Mac, Linux), whereas only 17% are mobile users -- how can it be possible that our traffic dropped for 50% even though it wasn't mobile-friendly?
2. We made a search on Google based on our most popular keywords that previously ranked us on the top of Google search results.
3. We picked the top 3 sites from the search result and analyze them using Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.

Bingo! Three of them were confirmed mobile-friendly by Google testing tool! Therefore, we suspected that Google was trying to make use of their search engine influence to force everyone to make their websites mobile-friendly or else the global volume of online mobile users can never be increased.

Since then, we begun the research on Mobile-Friendly Design Technique known as Responsive Web Design (RWD). Within 2 weeks, somewhere in mid of Feb 2015, we had successfully converted almost 100% of our site to meet the "mobile-friendly definition" of Google. In the third week of Feb, not only we managed to recover the 50% of our traffic loss, our site traffic had increased for another 30% more, breaking our all-time traffic records!

However, as we all know, Googlebot and their mobile testing tools are just robots, they can't really judge the true mobile-friendliness of a particular website -- our quick conversion to meet Google's requirements was just an "immediate disaster recovery" approach. But undeniable, with such a force from Google, sooner or later, "the lie will become the truth" -- we have to get ourselves ready for that, and our new mobile menu system is part of our initiative, not only to meet the increasing needs of future mobile users on the web but also to make ourselves ready for the April official launching of Google's mobile-friendly algorithm update.

The Importance of this New Mobile Menu System

As we disclosed earlier, in order to quickly recover our site traffic, we need to take a quick approach to meet Google's requirements. As a result, our old menu bar turned out become what is being shown in the picture on the left. This caused the following problems:

1. The menu items ended up become vertically presented and inefficiently took up so much of valuable spaces.
2. We have no choice but to hide away the social share buttons which previously always available to users at the left edge of the screen. This could lead to tremendous losses of social engagement to our site.
3. Low Above-the-Fold variation across pages as the site header and menu took up almost 40% of the visible area of all pages. This wasn't only a bad experience to mobile users but potentially to Google search engine as well.

In order to address the above three major issues, we've came up with this new menu system for our mobile visitors:

The Universal Menu Icon

As you can see on the picture on the right, the space consuming menu bar has now been replaced with an Universal Menu Icon (three dark thick lines) commonly found on most modern web browsers and websites. Tapping on this icon will animatedly drop down the semi-transparent dark menu as shown below. Notice that the picture banner is now stretched to full width, making the overall presentation much sleeker than before. Also note that we've adjusted the square logo to smaller size for larger view area.

The Default View of the Menu

As mentioned above, we can now bring back the four social share buttons and place them on our new menu as the default expanded section. We made this a default for the following reasons:

1. To quickly provide users a rough idea on the content popularity of that particular page.
2. To make social share activity more convenient to users.
3. To compensate the core missing part of our website that previously available on desktop view.

The Whole New Design of Course Category Browsing Icons

By clicking on the Browse for Courses label, you will animatedly expand it for a total of seven newly designed course category icons. The last icon is the View All icon that will bring you to the Training Courses Page that contains all the courses listed in bullet form, grouped by category. But why we never use back the category icons as shown in the desktop view? -- According to studies, photos with human gain a higher click-through rate than symbolic icons. I apologize for not being able to show you the source of this study but I did read it from somewhere else. Therefore, we decided to use the round photo icons, not only to expect for higher click-through but also to make it different from the traditional desktop view in order to give our mobile users a different feeling and experience. About the question whether we have any plan to replace our old course category icons in future, we still cannot answer it at this moment.

Our Advice to Local Training Providers

As we explained in our background stories, maintaining our own corporate training website can be very costly and tired when your core business is not in online marketing and web development. While having a corporate website is good for corporate image, it may not be wise to excessively invest it for online marketing and B2B effectiveness for the following reasons and conditions:

1. You can't afford to convert your current website architecture to support mobile users and satisfy the Google mobile-friendly guidelines.
2. When you're just a small-medium size training company who just want to focus on your training business and passion.
3. When you can't afford to hire a team of webmaster and marketing analyst just for your online marketing purposes.
4. When you're just a new start-up training company.
5. Following the "trendy" Google SEO Guidelines can be very costly and tired.
6. You can't afford to get a penalty from Google after all expensive investments had been made on your website.
7. You want a recurring business leads, not a high recurring monthly cost that greatly reduce your profits, making your pricing less competitive and defeat your overall business purpose.

If you think the above are true to your conditions, you can consider running through our I'MTP Snowball Quick Tour and reading our I'MTP White Paper for a right online marketing solutions for your training business.