The Savannah Morning News and savannahnow.com recently re-launched their mobile website — m.savannahnow.com — with an emphasis on ease of content discovery and a goal of helping users quickly and simply accomplish their daily web related tasks.
On savannahnow.com’s full desktop website people expect a homepage loaded with a collection of content that is a snapshot of all savannahnow.com has to offer: News and story headlines, photos, video, blogs, classifieds and more. The desktop website is a presentation that lends itself to allowing readers to take their time exploring all the different content available.
People are using the mobile web in ever increasing numbers, however, and with the mobile experience users interact with sites in a different way. People are accustomed to using their smartphones to solve tasks and find information quickly, easily and efficiently and usually head to sites with a specific objective in mind.
Accordingly, with the redesigned savannahnow.com mobile site we had to pivot our strategy and view the mobile presentation more as a tool people use to get jobs done, rather than as a site people leisurely explore.
Screen real estate is obviously at a premium on a mobile device, so the redesigned m.savannahnow.com website needed to meet the challenges of both presenting the necessary content, as well as doing so in a way that was easy to navigate and user-friendly.
The solution was to have a homepage that actually has no predetermined news content on it at all. Instead, navigation is front and center, allowing the user to decide where they need to go to get the information they are seeking.
We have a lot of valuable content on savannahnow.com, and with the easy to use navigation on the new m.savannahnow.com mobile homepage users can quickly and easily choose to read the latest headlines, view the weather radar, find events and things to do, check movie listings, view spotted photos, search auto, real estate and jobs listings, find local business information and more.
Everything is right at your fingertips.
We also realize that more and more people are coming to our mobile site via links on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, to give readers the best user experience for their mobile devices we knew optimizing story pages for readability and functionality was paramount.
To that end, the mobile site story pages have been enhanced, with better presentation and sharing tools for social media, links to additional popular site content, slideshows and video.
The Savannah Morning News recognizes that your time is valuable, and we hope the new savannahnow.com mobile experience helps you easily and efficiently find the information you are looking for to enrich your life on a daily basis.
Chris A. White is the digital media technical manager of savannahnow.com and the lead developer of the new savannahnow.com mobile website.