Your website is an ever-evolving part of your online presence. Now many businesses are looking to mobile websites. They have been around for a while, and are now considered to be an integral part of any business’ online marketing strategy. It’s all thanks to the wide spread adoption of smart phone and tablet technology.

Think on these stats…

A study published by Google in the fall of 2012 found that 72% of consumers think it’s important for businesses to have a mobile-friendly site. 96% of them have come across sites that weren’t. 61% of them would simply leave a site that wasn’t mobile friendly.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Searches are 5 times more likely to leave a site that doesn’t immediately deliver on their mobile phone than they are at their computer.

This can help your business

• Give visitors the information they are looking for about your business.
• Help to assist with purchasing decisions and the online buying process.
• Capture leads and make sales.
• Participate with you on social media, as most smartphone users also use their devices to connect with their social accounts.

So what’s the difference between mobile web browsing and that done on a regular computer? Essentially, anything you want your visitors to do on your website you want to also facilitate on your mobile site. Well, mobile visitors obviously have a lot less real estate in terms of view screen. Information needs to be presented in a way that’s easy to read and digest on a mobile device.

They also have a lot less patience. They are looking for something, perhaps while on the go, and they want to access it quickly and easily. They probably won’t browse around as much as they would if they were sitting at their desk.

Tips for a mobile friendly site

- Optimize your mobile version for mobile browsing. Organize your main menu around large, simple icons that can be understood at a glance like on Agendize mobile platfrom. Avoid users having to zoom in and out .

- Present the most important information and make it clearly accessible. What people are looking for shouldn’t be more than a click or two away.

- Keep in mind that the reference size for a smartphone is the iPhone 5 with its 4 inch screen, so don’t overload your pages.

- Don’t forget to auto-redirect your users to your mobile site if they arrive at your website from their mobile. Offer a clear link from your main site to your mobile site and vice versa (linking from your mobile site to your main site).

- Limit your content, keeping it nice and short. Users want the information and they want it now! Don’t bog them down with long paragraphs and chunks of text. Stick to the minimum amount of content you need to communicate and use catchy titles to further grab interest.

- Forget about large pages with interminable scrolling. If visitors do need to do a bit of scrolling, make sure that the most important information is at the top so that it’s the first thing a mobile visitor sees.

- Simplify the browsing. Two navigation elements should be the maximum, with one single menu even better. If you need more than two simultaneous menus, use a navigation panel that opens to the left or right, like on Facebook for instance.

- Think about what it is you want website visitors to do and bring that to your mobile site. So if you want your site visitors to use your online appointment scheduling tool, include this functionality as part of your mobile presence.

- Display your social media profiles.

- Don’t forget your SEO. Think about mobile friendly SEO elements, such as URLs and tagging, to make your mobile site a part of your overall search marketing strategy.

Mobile websites are here and they are here to stay. Make sure your business is ready to capitalize.

Do you have a mobile version of your website? How did you handle it? If not, what’s holding you back?

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social media network, celebrated its 10 year anniversary on May 5^th. To commemorate a decade of success, the LinkedIn team put together a really interesting infographic about their history and evolution, with numbers, dates, milestones and photos from their archives.

From a slow start to one of the top leading social media

 It’s kind of hard to imagine life before LinkedIn, as it’s become such a mainstream channel for professionals of all sorts and businesses large and small around the world. But it wasn’t always so popular. 10 years ago, this whole social media phenomenon was just taking its first baby steps. Just think, when they started, Facebook hadn’t even been founded yet! So LinkedIn’s beginnings were understandably a bit slow. A week after they first launched, they had 2,700 members, and a month later the number hadn’t even doubled, sitting at 4,700.

Despite the challenges getting things going and getting traction for what they were trying to do, they were eventually able to make tracks in the social landscape, leading them to the incredible success they enjoy today. As of now, they have 225 million members around the world – a far cry from those early days. They also offer their platform in 16 different languages. Apparently, two new people join LinkedIn every second!

The challenge of innovation

It’s not easy to stand out online with the plethora of sites and social media networks vying for attention. One way LinkedIn was able to enjoy such incredible success was thanks to their focus on innovation. Their address book functionality, for example, was one early tactic that allowed them to make headway. Enabling the powerful and very popular recommendations feature in 2006 was another huge boon.

2012 was a year of big changes – product innovation and transformation were the name of the game, all revolving around 3 main concepts: simplify, grow, everyday.

At Agendize, we can definitely relate to LinkedIn’s journey and what it’s like to startup a business that revolves around technology and a concept that hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. When we first started with our customer service software and tools, it was still a pretty new idea. Seeing things like Click to Chat and Online Scheduling on a website was a rarity. But we believed in what we were doing. We saw that this was the way of the future. And we stuck with it. That’s what the journey to success is all about!

 So, LinkedIn we salute you and wish you a very happy birthday!

Are you a LinkedIn member? How have you used the platform to advance your career or your business? Let us know in the comments.

You can now manage your appointment-based business directly from a smartphone. No need to get stuck behind a desk for hours, switching endlessly from keyboard to mouse while accessing your appointment calendar.

Your user friendly & mobile-optimized platform

Manage your staff, see their individual daily planning. Access the analytics and reports of your account, set all your tool preferences, define your company services and the reminder messages you want to send to your clients.

Manage your business wherever you go

Access all your online appointments from your mobile. See your calendar for the day, for the week or for the month at your convenience. Accept, modify or decline any appointment from your entire schedule quickly and easily via your mobile device. Check your customers’ profiles and get easy access to their contact information.

Work when it suits you, during your commute, while traveling, wherever your smartphone allows you.

A glimpse of your new mobile interface:

 Have you already tried our mobile online scheduling tool? Do you like it? What would you suggest to improve it? 

Agendize, the leading provider of customer engagement solutions for online businesses, and already established in Montreal, New York and Troyes, France, continues its international expansion by opening two additional offices in Mexico City and Brussels.

An international business strategy.

Already long-established in North America, Agendize has been expanding into new territories through becoming a leading solutions provider in the Latin American and European markets.

E-commerce in Mexico has increased significantly in 2012, reaching between $4.6 and $4.9 billion (U.S.) – source. As for Europe, it is the largest e-commerce market in the world with an annual turnover of 300 billion euros - source.

A natural extension to both burgeoning and established markets is the ability to offer interactive services to online consumers such as Live Chat, Click-to-Call and online scheduling; the prospect of which represents an opportunity to increase Agendize’s market share across several international markets.

By opening two new offices, led by Laura Vancompernolle in Mexico and Erwan Douarinou in Brussels, respectively, Agendize strengthens its position as a global leader in cloud / SaaS –based services and has built its business around delivering best of breed solutions, coupled with strong partnership relations throughout its customer base of: Resellers, Digital Marketing Agencies, Hosting Companies, Telco’s and Website builders.

About Agendize

Founded in 2003, Agendize offers a suite of private-labeled, interactive, applications that boost engagement between online businesses and their customers. These include Online Appointment Scheduling, Click-to-Call and Live Chat. The flexibility of Agendize solutions and its dedicated customer support team help connect more than 55,000 companies, in 20 countries, to their customers.

Usually, when you install an Agendize Live Chat button on a page, you also get a chat tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. The tab usually looks something like this:

Live Chat tab that appears at the bottom of each web page

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a few questions about whether or not there’s a way to hide this tab. Great news: of course you can! Here’s a quick pro tip to explain how to do it. You need to modify some HTML code, but don’t worry, it’s a pretty simple modification.

1) Once you’ve created your Live Chat button and go to the Get Code page, make sure you use the HTML code labeled “Website (HTML)”

2) The code should look like this (the numbers that are in red below will be different in your code, because they are unique identifiers for your Chat button):

<img src="https://az2.agendize.com/web//img/chat_en.gif" 
onclick="AZ_show('14377')" style="cursor:pointer;" 
id="az_14377"/><script id="azscript" type="text/javascript" 
src="https://az2.agendize.com/web/agendize.js?id=14377"></script>

4) Toward the end of the code, remove the “?id=14377” (remember, the number will be different in your code) making the code look like this:

<img src="https://az2.agendize.com/web//img/chat_en.gif" 
onclick="AZ_show('14377')" style="cursor:pointer;" 
id="az_14377"/><script id="azscript" type="text/javascript" 
src="https://az2.agendize.com/web/agendize.js"></script>

5) Copy this new code and paste it to your web page’s HTML code in the spot where you would like the Chat button to appear, and you’re done! You’ll have a Live Chat button, and the tab at the bottom of the page will only open when a visitor clicks on the button to start a chat.

If you need any help with the above, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Agendize offers the most complete suite of interaction tools on the market. The majority of the over 55,000 small businesses using Agendize use two or more of our tools.

In the last few months, we’ve spent a lot of time speaking with our customers and have learned a lot from them. One example is a plumber named Mark. Mark has 2 other plumbers working for him. Mark and his team spend most of their time on the road, so there is rarely anybody at the office. In fact, the company phone number usually just forwards calls to Mark’s cell phone. Mark wants his clients to be able to schedule appointments without having to call him, so Agendize Online Scheduling is a perfect solution, but he can’t use any of the other Agendize tools because there is nobody at the office to answer chats, phone calls, or emails.

We want Agendize to be even more accessible to all small business owners like Mark. To make that possible, we’ve changed our pricing plans and are happy to announce some flexible new options:

New Agendize pricing plans

The new plans are really simple: If a business wants to use only Online Scheduling, only Click-to-Call, or only Live Chat, they can now do that for only $20/month. If they want to continue using our full suite, the $50/month Full Suite plan is, of course, still available. For more information, visit our Pricing page.

We’re really excited about these new plans, and are certain that they’ll offer Mark, and any other business the flexibility they need to use Agendize to manage their customer relationships. We have some big plans for 2013 and can’t wait to share some of the other great things that we’ve been working on.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve launched a big new feature this week: call recording in Click-to-Call. Now, you can choose to record all of the calls you receive via your Click-to-Call button! This is a great way for a business to make sure that their clients are getting consistent, friendly support, or to keep track of what customers are calling about. It’s something that’s often been requested, and we’re so pleased to be launching it today.

Here’s how to enable it:

1. Log into your Agendize account and go to the Tools menu
2. Find your existing Click-to-Call button and edit it
3. Once editing the button, click on Advanced Options to expand that section
4. Scroll down below the list of countries and you will see the following option:
5. Check the Call Recording box and save your button, and you’re good to go!

Once you’ve turned on recording, every call made with that button going forward will be recorded and kept on our servers for 30 days. To access the recordings, just go to the Reports menu and look under Call Details. You will see a new column labeled RECORDING which will contain a button that lets you download each call’s recording.

We hope you enjoy this new feature, and if you have any questions, just let us know!

This morning we launched a couple of new features that have been in high demand:

More Sorting Options for Services in Online Scheduling

Previously, there were a few different ways you could sort the list of services in your Online Scheduling widget: alphabetical order, by duration, or by price. We’ve now added the ability to choose a completely custom order.

For example, a nail salon’s services sorted alphabetically would look like this:

But, with the new “Custom order” option, you can set them up however you’d like:

Sending a Chat Transcript

Another new feature is the ability for your visitors to save a transcript of their chat at the end of each chat session. It can be saved to their computer as a PDF file or sent by email. To enable this feature, just go to the Tools menu, edit your Chat button and look for these settings:

Once it’s enabled, at the end of each chat, your visitors will see an interface like this to save or send their chat transcript:

We also made some other minor user interface improvements that you may notice. As always, please get in touch if you have any questions or comments!

Our team is doing some more globetrotting and we’ll be exhibiting at–or attending–the following conferences. We would love to meet with you, so let us know if you’ll be at any of these events.

•  March 4-5 in New York, NY for Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference
• March 18-20 in Boston, MA for BIA/Kelsey’s LEADING IN LOCAL: The National Impact
• March 19-21 in Germany for WorldHostingDays’ WHD.global

Hope to see you there!

We’ve recently received some questions about how to add Agendize tools to Blogger blogs, so here’s a quick explanation of how to do it in 2 minutes flat:

First, log in to your Blogger account, and select Layout on the menu:

Once you’re on the Layout page, click on Add a Gadget and then scroll down to find the HTML/JavaScript option:

Next, in another tab, log in to your Agendize account, go to the Get Code page of the button you would like to install on your Blogger site, and copy the Website (HTML) code:

Finally, paste that code into the Configure HTML/JavaScript window from Blogger:

Save that, and save your new arrangement, and voila, your Agendize button is now on every page of your blog!

Have any other questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments or Tweet us @agendize