You’ve built a great website for your business with beautiful design and navigation that makes it easy for visitors to find their way around. But simply creating a website isn’t enough – did you know 89 percent of consumers use search engines for purchase decisions? Or that 46 percent of mobile Web users are unlikely to return to a website they had trouble accessing from their phone? In today’s ever-connected world, optimizing your online presence is crucial. This means using available tools to improve your SEO, creating a mobile-friendly website and staying on top of the latest Web technologies.
I caught up with Bruce Arnold, Web developer at WebFL.US (short for Web Design Miami Florida), to discuss the company’s view on Web marketing today and the different technologies businesses can take advantage of to improve their online presence. He says the two necessary ingredients to Web marketing success are visibility and accessibility. If there’s no visibility, nobody can find you. Accessibility is about once they find you -- can they access what you’re offering from any device?
WebFL.US is a Web design and development firm that focuses on standards-based development. Arnold explains that focus is one of the key differentiators for the company – every Web page or app it delivers will pass all 10 tests of W3C compliance, which include testing for content and HTML5, format and CSS3, JavaScript behavior, links, mobile Web and metadata.
The company is also invested in WebRTC, a technology that enables real-time communications with a single click – no downloads or plugins to install. Arnold explains that the WebRTC development we’ve seen so far has only scratched the surface of WebRTC’s potential. He says the lack of support so far from Apple and Microsoft and Google’s goal to dominate the space are playing a part in preventing the technology to truly become open source.
“We want to focus on WebRTC technologies where somebody doesn’t control a piece of it,” he said, emphasizing the importance of open source. “If a technology is supposed to be an open technology, but there’s one player or vendor with absolute control over one component, if the puzzle doesn’t work without that one piece, how open is it really?”
He also says this open source challenge is preventing the technology from becoming stable. The ongoing debate on video codec standards is “about turf wars,” he said. “That’s holding things back. Every time there’s an issue like that, that holds up standards development. Then you hold up the roll outs that depend on standards development. It’s a reverse domino effect.”
In the meantime, WebFL.US is still using available technologies to provide WebRTC functionality to businesses, such as peer-to-peer CDN and using the WebRTC data channel. It has the potential to change the way businesses provide customer support and improve sales and marketing efforts. Looking at the company’ WebRTC glossary may make some businesses feel like a deer in the headlights, he said, but a faster website they understand.
The company worked with CustomCleaningByGaby.com to implement WebRTC functionality, which is essentially showing customers in a “clean mirror” online. The website uses the WebRTC data channel to accelerate image and planned video loads and the getUserMedia API to enable technology for a Web marketing app.
At the end of the day, the company focuses on responsive design and helping businesses optimize their websites with the right technology. “The mobile Web and the Web are very rapidly becoming the same thing,” Arnold said. He explained that to some people, WebRTC is a prototypical example of the convergence of computing and communications technologies that people have been talking about for 20 to 30 years.
“We’re at the tipping point where there is going to be more search and traffic from mobile devices than from non-mobile devices. Mobile phones, tablets and touchscreen PCs are becoming the standard devices people are using. Obviously WebRTC is going to have a play in that,” he said.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
