MEETinLEEDS goes Mobile- by Matt Hamnett

Over the past couple of months we've been working on a mobile version of our website.

It’s been something that we’ve wanted to do for quite some time – we know that we get a lot of delegates on campus who use their mobile phones to access our website to find out more information about the venue that they’re visiting.  We’ve also seen over the past year or so that more and more people are viewing websites on their mobile phones, and our web statistics are backing this up.

So with this in mind we knew we wanted to make visiting our site as easy as possible no matter what device our customers were using.

I started by doing some research into the mobile future of the web and found some interesting statistics.  There are 5.3 billion mobile users globally, that’s 77% of the world’s population, and the mobile web is predicted to overtake desktop figures by 2013/14.  Clearly we needed to be aware of how our customers saw us on-line.

Of course www.meetinleeds.co.uk was, and is, accessible via any mobile phone that had an internet browser, but were our customers getting the same sharp experience that we’d expect them to have if they were viewing the site on a desktop computer?  We’ve always been confident that the site looks good and is easy to use but we noticed that if we navigated our way through the site on our mobile then the pictures weren’t so large and impressive and the links were harder to spot, and access.

At this point we knew we wanted to make something that would look better and be easier to use, so we set about working out what content should be on there and what it should look like.

You can access the site on any mobile device by visiting www.meetinleeds.co.uk (or if you're reading this on your desktop just scan the QR code on the right with your mobile) – it will automatically recognise your device and redirect you to our mobile website.  

We hope you like it and would love to hear your feedback!

Socially Adept - by Matt Hamnett

For a conference sales office at a major UK university we like to think of ourselves as a sociable, friendly and interesting group of people who will go out of our way to help our customers. For those of you who have been keeping up with this blog I hope that this has come across well: perhaps we’ve helped you manage your event, understand your competition or even cater for your in-laws?!

In order to show everybody just how sociable and helpful we are we use a number of very different online tools; we have a YouTube channel, a news page, a Flickr account, a regular email newsletter and of course this blog. 

All of these have been fantastic ways to keep in contact with our growing number of customers but it is our twitter account that has seen the most online progress.

Just recently we’ve moved past the 500 followers mark. Ok, we’ll never be a Stephen Fry or Justin Bieber, but seeing as we rarely promote ourselves on twitter we’re very pleased to have made an impression on so many people.

To satisfy this demand for more information on our venues and services, and in order to reach out to a different audience, we’ve developed a Facebook page.

We’re interested to see where this latest social space will take us and we hope you will join us by liking our Facebook page.