Google is using the similarly spelled (but differently pronounced) city to kick off GoMo, a program that aims to raise awareness and encourage businesses to create mobile-friendly websites. You can learn more about the program here. With the way retail habits and smart phone sales are trending, this is a wise move by Google. It’s high time businesses get serious about creating mobile-friendly websites. Here are three reasons why.

Tis the Season to Shop

Mobile sites are especially important as we approach the holiday season, when consumers are shopping fast and on the go. It’s expected that the percentage of shoppers purchasing from their smart phones will rise to 15% this holiday season, up from just 4.5% last year. Additionally, 27% of smart phone owners will use their devices in some way for holiday shopping. Those are not small numbers and making the switch to a mobile site could mean big business for many retailers.

Consumers Prefer Mobile Sites Over Applications

A recent study showed that 13.1 million consumers accessed retail content via their mobile phones and 63% of that was to mobile sites, not applications. Applications may be fun, but they have to be customized to operating systems. Applications can’t always provide a full scope of your business offerings or goods. With well over half of the audience preferring to visit a website, your company is better off optimizing your full site for mobile search rather than building a separate application to maintain it.

Advertising Opportunities

According to research from earlier this year, 79% of Google’s top advertisers do not have mobile optimized websites. With online shopping on the rise, it’s not a good idea for retailers to have a difficult-to-navigate site that deters busy consumers and makes advertising difficult for Google. So Google has put their foot down this year and announced that they will show preference in advertising to websites that mobile optimize – meaning websites that avoid Flash and have simple, prioritized, and easy-to-navigate content.

If you need guidance to launch your mobile-friendly site, Google is here to help. Last week’s conference in Mobile was just the starting point of a much larger campaign. Employees from Google and mobile Web developers DudaMobile not only provided on-site help for local business owners during the event, they’ve also launched an online campaign to help those of us who couldn’t make the trip south.

Howtogomo.com provides explanations about mobile’s importance, where to find mobile developers near you, and even a GoMoMeter to test how your website looks right now on a mobile phone. We’re happy to say Luckie & Company passed with flying colors. Business owners should take heed – without a mobile optimized site, your business could be left out in the cold this Christmas.

Kammie Avant is Social Media Planner at Luckie & Company. You can contact her by email or follow her on Twitter.

Photo credit: Jamelah via Flickr

Since 1953, Luckie has helped clients tell powerful stories — stories that build brands. Within Luckie’s Digital group, stories are also used to build software — perhaps not stories in the traditional sense but powerful stories nonetheless. In the more technical halls of Luckie, where the digital production team dwells, we use the word “stories” to mean each of the steps — some large, some miniscule — that we’ll need to complete in order to bring a digital project to life.

You could look at these “user stories” as a sort of task list, but it’s far more important and empowering than that. They are a central part of agile software development, a system we’ve long embraced here at Luckie.

Each project’s list of stories contains small, non-technical descriptions of how we want a website or piece of software to work. We break even the largest projects down into manageable bites, which helps ensure that each component works the best it can. High-quality parts make a high-quality whole.

Agile software development discourages programmers from using formal requirement documents for each step of a project. Instead, we use stories that describe each software goal from the client’s perspective. This lightweight replacement for cumbersome documentation is far more effective than trying to write a comprehensive owner’s manual for a site before it’s even built — especially considering the reality that requirements are likely to change throughout development.

Here are just a few of the “stories” we create:

• Visitor views list of music festivals
• Visitor filters music festivals by city
• Admin associates a genre with an artist
• Admin deletes a music festival

At the very beginning of a project, client stakeholders and Luckie project managers take part in conversations to essentially gather requirements. The goal of these initial conversations is to capture high-level concepts that represent the features and requirements of the software being developed. These concepts would ideally be so focused that they could be written on an index card, which is where the term “story carding” comes from. After these high-level concepts are captured, they are then broken down into more granular user stories.

To remind developers what makes a solid user story, agile process guru Bill Wake created the INVEST acronym. INVEST stands for independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable. Stories are easiest to work with if they are independent and have few dependencies on other stories. The more coupled stories are, the harder it is for multiple developers to work in parallel.

Good stories should be negotiable, meaning that the client and the developers can shape story details during development. Part of the very definition of agile software development describes the ability to adapt to and welcome change, which fits perfectly with the ever-changing world of advertising. User stories should also be valuable to the client. We want to deliver exactly what our clients want; no more, no less.

Stories also should be estimable to better allow for prioritization and planning. A story that is hard to estimate means that it should probably be broken down into smaller stories or even be brought up in further client conversations. A benefit of small stories is that they contain less uncertainty and cover less scope, which also enables more accurate estimates. And lastly, a good story is one that is testable. We practice test driven development which means we write tests before we write working code. Writing tests first means we’re describing what our code should be able to do up front and then writing just enough code to make that test pass.

With these principles in mind, we’re able to write tangible user stories that are used to drive the software development process. Pivotal Labs is a company that developed Pivotal Tracker, a Web-based project management tool that harnesses the power of user stories. We use Pivotal Tracker on a daily basis. After importing stories into Pivotal Tracker, we first have to estimate them. We assign a point value to the story based on complexity: the lower the point value, the lower the complexity. We’re also able to organize and group related stories together into a logical flow.

Once stories are estimated and ordered, we begin an iteration, which is typically one week. Shorter iterations allow for frequent deliverables to the client, which in turn, allow for more frequent feedback from the client. That week’s stories sit at the top of the backlog, waiting for a pair of developers to begin work on it. Once the pair has completed the work to meet the acceptance criteria for any given story, they mark it as finished where it can be delivered and ultimately accepted or rejected by the client. As the iterations pass, Pivotal Tracker helps us gauge progress and better predict how long it will take to complete the project.

User stories are a driving force behind delivering quality software at Luckie. They serve as a medium for communication written by both client and developer. While good stories definitely help build brands, agile user stories connect us with our clients to deliver on a project that both sides can be proud of.

Lee Smith is a Developer at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Photo credit: Spinstah via Flickr

Luckie Digital Designer Chris Nager, right, with CSS guru Eric Meyer

Thanks to Luckie & Company, I experienced one of the greatest opportunities of my lifetime. In June, I represented my agency at a Web design conference in Atlanta, An Event Apart. It featured speakers that lead the Web industry like An Event Apart co-founders Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. I’d like to share with you some of the most important things I took away from the conference.

Design responsively

Ethan Marcotte, the brilliant mind behind responsive design, asks, How do you experience the Web? Do you spend most your time in your browser on your laptop and desktop computer or on your smartphone? And what phone do you own? Is it an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry? Do you use a tablet like an iPad to browse the Internet? We are at a turning point in Web design history – it’s time to start thinking about content delivery. Your user wants to view your site’s content. It is not your say in how your users choose to view it (be it on a mobile device, Kindle reader, laptop, etc.), it is your job to serve it to them. Here is an example of a responsive design that I created. Open it up and resize your browser window, then open the site on your mobile device. You will see how the design adapts or responds to your choice of device.

Mobile first (inspired by Luke Wroblewski)

In regards to responsive design and content delivery, we, as designers, must shift our priorities to designing for the mobile device first and foremost. The reason behind this “mobile first” philosophy is to force us to decide what content is most important to feature on such a small screen. In mobile and small screen design, it is extremely important that the user can find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. All cruft must be removed so the important content stands out. The “mobile first” philosophy is vital to larger screen designs because it makes us ask whether the content we feature is important enough to be in the larger screen designs. There is no reason to punish our users for using a large screen to view our site by filling our designs with useless information decoration.

Designing in the browser

With the current and future capabilities of Cascading Stylesheets, as designers, we are able to bring the designing process from Photoshop straight in the browser. Photoshop will still remain as a fundamental tool in Web design, but currently has a major limitation. The first step in building a Photoshop document requires setting a document width and height. In today’s Web design, we must account for flexible designs that can be experienced on mobile devices, desktop browsers, and everything between.

Progressive enhancement with HTML5/CSS3

Gone are the days of table-based designs and <div> soup to create beautiful designs. The latest version of CSS allows designers to embrace wonderful design techniques in the browser without slicing images to achieve gradients, shadows, rounded corners and a whole slew of other design flare without adding bloat to our sites’ file sizes. Small file sizes are extremely important when designing for mobile devices that rely on cell networks for Internet connection. Web designers must progressively enhance their sites so that all their users get a great experience and are able to view the content, but users with the latest and greatest browsers will receive an even better experience. The browsers will degrade gracefully down the line. Viewers that use browsers that are years old will get a gracefully degraded, simpler experience.

Web typography has arrived

Jason Santa Maria, creative director for Typekit, spoke about using beautiful type on the Web. He said any typographer will tell you good typography is invisible, which is best illustrated by his analogy of air conditioning. Let’s say you are in a business meeting. People may politely interrupt to ask if the A/C could be turned up or down, but no one will stop a meeting to exclaim the A/C is set perfectly. The perfectly set A/C is invisible, likewise good typography is unnoticed. High contrast is also extremely important when dealing with type on the Web. Readability is everything when delivering content to your user and contrast in your type helps. Our digital team has brought beautiful typography to the web with services like Typekit, Google Web fonts, and Fonts.com. Using real text instead of sliced images improves Search Engine Optimization and future-proofs our apps and sites by making them easy to update the type.

UI styleguides

Aaron Walter, the user experience design lead for MailChimp, spoke about the importance of workflow in the digital realm. He suggested building out User Interface styleguides in HTML/CSS before beginning any Web project. I have used this technique in a few of our latest projects at Luckie and it serves as a great start to a project. For an example of what I am describing, check out Bootstrap, from Twitter that was launched a few weeks ago. It is a great starting point styleguide for building Web apps.

There is one Web (inspired by Jeremy Keith)

As Web designers and developers, we must look to future-proof our sites and apps. There is not a “mobile Web” and a separate “desktop Web.” There is one Web connecting people to content all over the world in many different ways, ways in which we have yet to think. Web design should be device-agnostic. The tools are catching up to the rapidly changing industry. It is important that agencies stay relevant in this ever-evolving Web.

It’s vital that we educate our clients about what they should expect. Pixel perfect design between browsers and the multitude of new devices should be no longer relevant in today’s website and app designs.

I love what I do and An Event Apart has fueled my passion for designing for the Web.

TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read): The Web is evolving and we, as designers, must adapt to delivering content to all sorts of new devices that hit the market. The mobile Web does not exist, there is one Web. The best Web design is device-agnostic.

Chris Nager is a Digital Designer at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow @chrisnager on Twitter.

Photo credit: Pete Karl II
Source: lukew.com

A few months ago, our client AMERICAN Cast Iron Pipe Company asked us to create a world-class website.  We were up for the challenge.

Introducing american-usa.com!

The design and overall appearance of the site is by far the best that I know of among waterworks-related businesses. It clearly differentiates the client from competitors and reinforces that AMERICAN is a reliable, quality-driven manufacturer that does things the right way.

What jumps out to me the most is how much better the photography and other images are on the new site.  Product photos project strength and high quality – looking at them makes you feel like you’re on a showroom floor. The new pipe installation animations are precise to the last detail and are light-years ahead of the old installation videos that were on the old site.  A lot of thought and effort went into getting satisfactory imagery, and it shows.

Photos and other illustrations shouldn’t detract from the importance of other content on the site. Shelley DeLuca, our Senior Content Strategist, coordinated gathering, editing and posting all content, and she possesses a fierce attention to detail.  Long before the site went live, the client had come to love her work.

Navigation of the site was well thought out, and it’s very easy for visitors to use. One click from the home page shows every product category that AMERICAN manufactures, and two or three clicks will provide any needed information. The site’s navigation is exactly what the doctor ordered.

As good as the site is, we’re just beginning.  What will really make this a world-class website is the continuous development of content.  The factory has been built and is ready for use, but without great raw materials, the factory will not produce to its potential capacity.

From my vantage point, developing great content and utilizing the new site’s potential will require  Luckie & Company and AMERICAN to take its great 55-year relationship and make it even better.  The technology is in place now; now it’s up to us to really make it work.

Charlie Ingram is Senior Account Supervisor at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email.

Discover Digital Life is a website created by TNS, a global market research company headquartered in London. The site offers an up-to-date view of mobile and Internet usage worldwide and is the most comprehensive study of the global digital consumer ever done.

The site breaks down the digital presence of more than three dozen countries. It’s a fascinating look at which countries spend the most time online, the percentage of people who do, which countries utilize social media the most, and other interesting facts. Ever wondered about Estonia’s digital presence? Norway? Nigeria? The results may surprise you.

All of the information is presented in a very colorful way, making 
figures, pie charts and percentages look quite cool and appealing to lure even a designer into a site that deals with hard facts. The photo above shows the percentage of Italians who shop via computer.

Markus Beige is Design Director at Luckie & Company. He can be reached by e-mail.