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WEBSITES Is Your Voice Over Talent Website Mobile-Friendly? Give It This Test ... December 17, 2014  By Debbie GrattanVoice Actor Note: This post originally appeared on Debbie Grattan's website and is republished here with permission from the original author. If you are a working voice over talent, you know it’s imperative that you have your own personal website to showcase your talent. Everybody knows that, right? But did you know that your site’s "mobile-friendliness” is going to become a more and more important factor when it comes to your search ranking and visitor interactions? With the state of technology today, just having a voice over talent website isn’t enough. It also needs to be easily viewed on mobile devices. Failing to address this aspect of your web design is likely going to hurt your search results at some point in the very near future as well as cause issues for your visitors when they can’t access your demos or get the information they need to determine if they’d like to hire you. AVOID THE BOUNCE What a bummer it would be to spend all the time, effort and expense to get visitors to your website, only to have them leave immediately simply because they can’t access your site on their smartphone or tablet. If your site isn’t easy to read, or the features aren’t working as they were intended, or visitors can’t listen to your demos quickly … they are going to bounce, and move on to the next voice over talent website on the list. Opportunity - and potential income - is lost, just like that. SEARCHING FROM SMARTPHONES According to the January 2014 Pew Internet Research Project, 90% of Americans have a cell phone and almost 60% of American adults have a smartphone. A solid 60% of adult cell phone users access the Internet from their phones. If you’d like to know how many of your visitors are accessing your voice over talent website via a smartphone, you can get a pretty good idea of that number in your Google Analytics account. I just looked at the past month’s data for my site, and 40% of new users were on mobile devices (30% smartphones, 10% tablets). SET UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS On a side note, if you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics for your website, do yourself a HUGE favor and get it done ASAP. There are plenty of articles online that can walk you through the process, or just use Google’s step-by-step checklist. You might need some help from your web designer to get the GA tracking code installed, but if your site is on WordPress, that step will be a breeze! My site is still in HTML so when I set this up originally I had to copy and paste the tracking code into every page manually. Eventually I just put it in my footer section so that it would appear on every page. It took a little time but it was easy to do and totally worth the effort! TEST FOR MOBILE-FRIENDLY Recently I learned about this Mobile-Friendly Test created by Google. You can plug in your voice over talent website URL and get it analyzed quickly to find out if your site is indeed, mobile-friendly. Give it a try right now and find out if your website is mobile-friendly. If your website passes the test, then you can rest easy knowing that you are in good shape when it comes increased traffic from mobile users. IF YOU DON'T PASS ... If your voice over talent website doesn’t pass the test, there are a few things you’ll want to consider. You will probably need to redesign your site a bit to make it more mobile-friendly. Currently, there are two common ways to go when it comes to upgrading for a more mobile-friendly design:
I recommend you read several articles and talk to your web designer. UPGRADED MY OWN SITE I went through this process myself a few months ago. I had my designer create a mobile version of my site back in 2010 but it was not quite up to snuff for 2014. So, I had it redesigned again this year. You can check it out from your mobile device (just search for Debbie Grattan on your mobile browser) or from your desktop computer. If you do take a spin through my site, please let me know what your experience was like and if you encountered any issues along the way. User experiences can vary a bit depending on what device is being used to view the site, so it’s important to test it on several different platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows phone, various tablets, etc.). I opted to create a separate mobile site that looked like my desktop voice over talent website, but was streamlined and built more for speed. My regular site has a lot more text than the mobile version, and by creating the separate mobile site, I had total control of how the site would look on a smartphone. I’m actually planning another redesign in 2015 to move to a totally responsive design. That seems to be a better way to go for many business owners, including voice over talents, since it is generally easier to manage one site than two. ----------------------- ABOUT DEBBIE Debbie Grattan has been a full-time female voice over recording artist for more than 20 years. She has collaborated on over 10,000 projects and partnered with hundreds of production companies, marketing and advertising firms, commercial voice over recording studios and corporate/business clients around the United States and abroad. Email: debbie@DebbieGrattan.com Web: www.DebbieGrattan.com Blog: www.debbiegrattan.com/blog/voice-over-talent-website-mobile-friendly |
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Randy