FoundLocally.com New Responsive Design Targets Tablets and Mobile Users to Optimize Local-search

    CALGARY, AB, August 09, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- FoundLocally.com Media Inc has released its flagship Foundlocally.com website [http://Foundlocally.com] in a new Responsive Design. The company released its first mobile version five years ago (2010) in response to growing smartphone usage (now one-third of visitor traffic). Over the past two years, tablet use has grown to one-third of website traffic, prompting the new "Responsive Design".

In June 2015, the company released Responsive Design versions of "sister" road-trip travel site TransCanadaHighway.com [http://www.TransCanadaHighway.com], and real estate/relocation website MovingInCanada.com [http://www.MovingInCanada.com].

Mark Ruthenberg, General Manager of FoundLocally said, "These sites allowed us to discover the tricks and tweaks to be properly Responsive. We anticipated that the FoundLocally website, with over 100,000 pages of web content, would require extensive recoding for each of the pages as well as for all the database interactions."

Design Issues

"For the Responsive Design, we evaluated tools like WordPress, but realized they would dramatically slow the performance for a website our size. Therefore, an in-house programming process was necessary and was completed in only two months," said Mark Ruthenberg.

The challenge to optimizing users' experience was determining where the tablet experience was more like a desktop and when a tablet was more like a smartphone. This also varied with screen resolutions and if the device was in tall ("portrait") or wide ("landscape") mode. Now the website has looser spacing to provide comfortable tap-targets for touch screen users across a range of devices.

The smartphone user experience has evolved significantly. Five years ago, the focus was on "crunching" a desktop screen's worth of content into a collapsible/expandable content to fit a tiny smartphone screen. Nowadays, following the prevalence of Facebook with mobile users, they expect the same content as on the desktop, just optimized for that device. Today, users are happy to scroll, scroll, scroll as long as they keep accessing more entertaining or useful content.

Performance improvements

WordPress sites tend to run slower, integrating dozens of Cascading Stylesheets (.CSS) and dozens of JavaScript files (.JS), as well as JQuery files, to create easy content management so non-technical people can manage their own websites. For a user on a smartphone paying for megabytes of file downloads, or a tablet user on a crowded public WiFi hotspot, the user experiences a slow website. (http://tinyurl.com/o5aqb8t)

FoundLocally.com's advertising revenues allow it to provide users lots of free content and enable local businesses add themselves to a totally free directory. Thus the site had to be as fast as possible so the ads could load quickly. The Responsive Design functionality with this rich interface artfully uses only 70 kilobytes of CSS and JavaScript.

Ease of Use improvements

As part of our Responsive Design transition, we reviewed each of our forms (over 100 for each of our 30 communities) to ensure compliance with current Best Practices.

FoundLocally.com added Quick-Keys to the Free Business Listing forms, to select templates for the most commonly-added business types. With Quick-Keys, a single keystroke (like "A" for accountants, "D" for dentists, "F" for florists, etc) selects the correct template for the top dozen business types. The templates pre-select multiple categories to improve business search-findability across the website. With over 100 templates, 80% of the businesses adding themselves have the most appropriate categories pre-selected (from over 5000 options), so they can skip Categories and go right to posting their News, Events, Coupons or Jobs, all integrated into FoundLocally.com no-cost platform. (http://tinyurl.com/noqrjqw)

FoundLocally has also added "3-1-1" as a valid phone number option, so municipalities can add their various recreational facilities and departments consistent with their own practices.

LocalMap improvements

FoundLocally also upgraded the LocalMap features to Responsive Design. This allows users to search everything around their current location, using their device's GPS location.
FoundLocally maps build on Google Maps technology by adding layers of data from FoundLocally's database of businesses, community groups, and other features. The layers that can be shown for each neighbourhood include:
• Attractions & Accommodations
• Communities & Homes
• Culture & Entertainment
• Dining & Shopping
• Emergency (fire, police, hospitals)
• Schools (and libraries)
• Shopping Areas
• Sports & Recreation

Each layer uses colour-coded pins to link to different types of listings. (http://tinyurl.com/pbpeo2c)

The FoundLocally.com website was launched in 1999, and combines in-depth community information (photos, maps, and editorial) about local shopping, business, travel, government, sports, and entertainment, with a local business directory complete with their events, jobs postings, coupons, and news releases. The site is an excellent resource for local residents as well as for business and vacation travelers.

Individual sites provide local coverage for Victoria & Vancouver Island, Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley, Okanagan-Shuswap, the Rockies, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste Marie, Sudbury, Barrie-Muskoka, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Oakville-Burlington, Mississauga-Brampton, Etobicoke, Toronto, Scarborough, North York, York Region, Oshawa-Durham, Ottawa-Gatineau, Fredericton, Halifax, Charlottetown, and St John's.

FoundLocally.com Media also publishes an SEO and web marketing blog [http://blog.FoundLocally.com], a Canada road-trip travel website [http://TransCanadaHighway.com] and neighbourhood real estate website [MovingInCanada.com].


MEDIA CONTACT:
Mark Ruthenberg
General Manager & Editor-in-Chief
FoundLocally.com Media Inc
Tel: 403 245-2194
Email: [email protected]
Website: FoundLocally.com

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