Mobile trends are important to non-profits because more and more supporters will be looking to interact with them via their mobile devices.

How many times have you been on your way to an event and needed directions? At a benefit and wished you could use your phone to donate? Or been so impressed that you wanted to find out how and when you can volunteer? A responsive website would make all of this possible, from a mobile device.

The websites for a couple of not-for-profit organizations we work with experienced a significant increase in traffic within the past year – 307% and 414% respectively. Based on this trend, we are forecasting  that by the end of 2012, mobile usage for both organizations will be a solid 30-35% of all site visits. Bottom line: even for NPO’s with tiny marketing budgets, the return on investment for a responsive website is huge.

Wondering how we crunched the numbers? Also see trends across other industries – Mobile + Municipal Government, Mobile + Security Products and Mobile + Construction.

We had the privilege of hosting a student named Daniel, who is planning a career in IT Security. While there is a bit of a gap between his business dreams and what I do at Top Draw on a regular basis, with the help of the team, we were able to keep him fairly busy for the entire day.

Daniel spent most of his morning in client meetings, learning about planning, preparing and presenting to clients. We then whisked him off to one of our favourite spots, Original Joes, for a quick lunch and then back to the office for another client meeting. Lucky for Daniel, we have some of the best clients in town (thank you to those of you who allowed Daniel to sit in on your meetings).

The afternoon meeting was followed by a necessary coffee break. White mocha in hand, Daniel and Taylor headed off to our new meeting space to discuss website design for the company Daniel is hoping to create as a part of JA’s Company Program. For his final hour, Daniel and I discussed the importance of setting expectations, giving and receiving feedback and preparing for staff evaluations.

I thoroughly enjoyed introducing this young man to our clients and staff. Daniel’s professionalism, poise and the ease with which he joined the Top Draw team underscores the calibre of students that come out of the Junior Achievement program. Adriel said it best when he described JA participants as “super kids”. Junior Achievement students are focused, passionate and have big dreams for their futures. We are proud to support such a great organization that helps talented students achieve their goals.

We wish you all the best Daniel. Thanks for spending the day with us!

Please visit the Junior Achievement website for more information on how you can get involved. You may also want to read Ken’s post on his involvement with last fall’s JA Company Program.

Mobile devices are increasing efficiency for many arms of a business operation. In fact, it appears that more and more business owners and procurement officers are using cell phones and tablets to seek out construction companies for upcoming projects. Add to that the growing number of potential employees looking for their next job on their Blackberry, iPhone or Android device, and it’s no wonder that the construction industry has experienced a 313% growth in mobile traffic over the past year. This is projected to account for 23% of all users by end of 2012.

It’s across numerous industries and it can’t be ignored. See the trends for municipal government, security products and non-profits, as well as how we crunched the numbers.

I hadn’t been to Whistler in over 20 years, so it was amazing to see the transformation that the lovely mountain town of my memory had undergone since hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. With all the fine dining and shops in the village, Whistler has all the amenities of a larger city with the quaint charm reminiscent of a European mountain town; and the Château Whistler Fairmont was an excellent venue for the conference.

Kudos to the organizing committee; the conference was extremely well done! From a traditional welcome by the First Nations dancers at the Squamish L’il Wat Cultural Center, to insightful presenters from a variety of industries, to the exquisite ice sculptures at the Winter Wonderland closing party, absolutely every detail of this event was perfectly planned and executed.

One of my personal highlights included speaking alongside Charly Pall from Google Canada. We have been talking a lot around the Top Draw office about the rapid growth of all things mobile, and Charly presented some mind-blowing statistics that confirm what we’ve been saying. Charly pointed out that there are now officially more mobile devices being activated every day than humans being born. Amazing to think about, isn’t it? We are in the middle of a digital revolution and businesses need to capitalize on the amazing opportunity that this quantum leap in mobile growth provides.

I also really enjoyed Sean Durfy’s presentation about his time as CEO of West Jet. With a no-nonsense approach to business, this guy really wears his heart on his sleeve. And it works. Under Durfy’s direction, WestJet has won – and continues to win – many prestigious “Top Employer” awards because of their corporate culture. One of the most impressive elements to Sean’s presentation was a video created by WestJet employees that highlights how much they care about what they do. For many companies, the “care” element is just lip service, but at WestJet it’s genuine. Their people are invested and they really do care. Pretty inspiring stuff.

Another highlight of the weekend was having my beautiful wife Kim attend the conference with me. It isn’t often that both of us can break away from our respective businesses for trips like this, so it was fantastic to have some time away together. Kim welcomed the opportunity to meet and engage with so many of my EO colleagues. She also took a lot of excellent notes during the presentations and discussions and graciously offered to make them available in PDF format. Thanks Kim!

I also want to say a heartfelt thank you to the Top Draw team, as many of them had a role in gathering information for my presentation at the EO conference. It was all new material pulled together specifically for Steep and Deep. Adriel and Taylor were instrumental in making it a success; thank you guys. I’d also like to say thanks to my fellow EO members for all of the great feedback. One always thinks afterwards of ways that certain elements of a presentation could have been improved, but I’m pleased that so many of you benefited from the information I shared. I also want to give a shout out to the Edmonton EO members for representing our fine city with such a high turn out for the conference.

In closing, Steep and Deep was a fantastic event that accomplished all that it set out. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, we did a lot of networking and we received a lot of takeaways that have provided immediate value for our businesses. I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference.

The slide deck from my Think Digital! presentation is available on our website, in addition to the presentation slides, Kim’s conference notes are available as well.

Nick’s Twitter profile reads:
I sing in the car. I work for the internet. I’d like to write more. #haiku

Here’s what a client had to say after a recent SEO consultation meeting with Nick:
“I have nothing to say but great things. I thought Nick was well prepared, knew his stuff, tailored it to my blog and goals, explained his recommendations well and I like how he made some immediate changes right there and then.”

Would you like to know even more about Nick? Read on!

How long have you been with Top Draw?
It will be 3 years in April.

What has been your favorite Top Draw project to date?
Hard to say. They’ve all been uniquely challenging and interesting.

What do you like best about working here?
Continually growing my overall knowledge and confidence in web design, development and marketing.

Got a quick SEO tip to share with your fans?
First you get the keyword research, then you get the title tags, content & inbound links, then you get the power.

How or why did you work your way into this career choice?
Initially, I just wanted to learn how to build a photography portfolio, having just bought my first SLR camera. Turns out I opened a can of worms that would be ever-intriguing and full of new problems to solve and new things to learn.

I eventually found myself experimenting with the popular CMS’s and then ultimately, with WordPress (which Top Draw now uses for the bulk of projects). I found these so empowering that I started building websites whenever I had an excuse. All the while I was indirectly building an understanding of how people find websites. One day I happened upon a job opening at Epiar, which offered the opportunity to further explore the current state of seo and build a career in web marketing. I applied, got the job and the rest is history.

I just recently completed my photography portfolio/site.

Did you have any interesting jobs as a kid?
In chronological order; I swept out the dust out of a large seed factory for a family friend, I was a cashier at Save On Foods, I vacuumed out cars at Bubbles carwash, and I delivered pizza for Panago. This took me roughly to the end of high school.

Any crazy items on your bucket list?
I want to see the Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids. I’d love to take a trip to Earth’s outer atmosphere. I also one day would love to live in a mountain village and snowboard daily.

If your project involves search engine optimization, you may have the opportunity to work with Nick. We appreciate his easy-going nature, how quickly he grasps all things web, his expertise and his insightful contributions to all discussions and projects.

Be sure to check back next month as we’ll interview the most tenured developer on the Top Draw team, Karim Jetha!

It’s early in the morning and you arrive at work and find that your store has been broken into. While you wait for the police to arrive, you sit in your car, frustrated and wondering what you could have done to prevent the break-in. Wanting to be proactive with a solution and help pass the time, you start to research security systems on your phone.

While that exact scenario probably only comprises a small percentage of the spike we’re discussing, it does illustrate a point. The mass availability of mobile devices is changing the game for many businesses because it allows people to access information with immediacy. Time is no longer a luxury. People are squeezing every spare moment out of their days and they’re sharing those moments with their mobile devices.

One of our customers who sells security products has seen a jump of 292% in their mobile traffic in the last year. If this trend continues, the mobile share for this site will be at 29% by the end of 2012. And while we hope that most customers browse under better circumstances than those we outlined above, wouldn’t it be nice to know that your customers could access the information they need on a mobile device when they require it the most?

For more information about how we got these numbers, check out Crunching the Numbers On Mobile Usage.

A highlight post is slated for a little bit later in the week, but in the meantime enjoy the notes from his presentation: Think Digital! Online Markting for Real Companies.

The metric I chose to represent mobile usage was as a percentage of all users of a website. So if a website analyzed had 300 mobile visitors and 700 non-mobile visitors in a month, mobile users represent a 30% share of all the users of that website.

Why relative numbers instead of absolute? I chose relative percentages of total users rather than the absolute number of mobile users because some of the websites analyzed had other effects that would have clouded analysis of mobile usage. Say a website is slower in summer, how do we account for the drop in mobile users? Is that good or bad? What if all the traffic, mobile and non, was growing for a given website? Does that mean that mobile was growing, or that the industry was seeing more online usage in general? Using the percentage of mobile users compared to total users lets us see past other website variables and gives us a trend that means something.

Using percentage of total users also gives our customer data an extra level of anonymity so that even if one of their competitors figured out which particular company we were referring to in an industry, they’re likely seeing the exact same data on their site and wouldn’t be able to discern any valuable competitive intelligence.

By using the relative percentage that mobile users represent for a given website, we’re able to see how the trend of adoption is growing and can accurately forecast usage for the upcoming year. It becomes crystal clear whether or not an industry absolutely should create a mobile friendly version of their website or whether they can put it off for a little while longer.

Journalists

Interested in writing a story about mobile devices and want to ask some questions? Need a particular statistic or a quote? Give us a call at 780-429-9993 and speak to one of our experts directly. Please feel free to use any of our infographics in a story, but please link back to the originating blog post.

Delighted to organize an online marketing presentation with Google, Ken will also team up with Charly Pall, Head of Industry at Google Canada, to provide eye opening insights on the digital revolution and how technology and innovation are creating enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs who are willing to take action.

Ken will be live tweeting the event at #EOC12 then check back here next week as we recap the weekend and their Saturday morning session entitled Think Digital: Mobile, Social, Local; New businesses with a new kind of consumer.

Kevin O’Leary, Chairman of O’Leary Funds and ruthless dragon on CBC’s Dragons’ Den, is the Feature Speaker at Steep and Deep.

It turns out that if you’re looking for information about rural Alberta, chances are even greater that your search will be done on a smartphone or other mobile device. We’ve been analyzing that statistics of a local municipal government website. It has seen a 300% increase in mobile visitors to the site in the the last year alone. If the trend continues, mobile users will account for about 43% of all website users by the end of 2012.

That’s a significant number.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about these statistics is that we’re talking about the type of place where news travels quickly; the kind of town where  you know your teenager has skipped school even before you see them at the end of the day (for which you can thank the local gas station attendant). Given this type of environment, some may question the need for any website at all; but for this town council it topped their priority list.

The website fills a variety of needs for this blossoming community: it helps to keep current residents informed about special events and town hall issues, it entices visitors with local attractions, and it informs potential residents of the perks of living in this lovely small town.

The part that makes us happiest? This website tackles legitimate needs of the community in a way that’s compatible with the rapidly increasing mobile lifestyle. And let’s face it, when it comes to rural municipal government, a functional and mobile friendly website is pretty forward thinking, and plain old awesome.