USIndoor's Official Magazine is a quarterly publication, dedicated to owners, managers, program administrators and other professionals, startups and providers involved with indoor recreational sports facilities.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/958380
SPRING2018 11 Go Mobile Since 2009, worldwide internet usage has been trending away from traditional computers and toward mobile devices. In 2016, more than half of all internet traffic came from mobile devices. Take your smartphone and pull up your facility's website. How does it look? Is it easy to read and vertically organized, or do you have to zoom in and swipe around the screen to find everything? Today, the most important aspect of any website is to be mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendly designs adjust based on your screen size, so your site will look good on desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. Search engines will also penalize your website in rankings if it is not mobile-friendly. A potential customer searching for sports facilities might be directed to a competitor because their website is mobile-friendly and yours isn't. Smartphones and tablets are now common in everyday life, and many of your customers and potential customers will see your facility's website through one of those devices. Redesigning your website may not be cheap, but it will offer a good first impression to potential customers and give an improved experience to current ones. Hosting Whether you're a startup or you're an existing operator looking for a new solution, finding the right website host is one of the most important, and possibly the toughest, decisions. Each host will set out the limits of their payment plans. It might be based on monthly visits, pageviews, bandwidth, or total storage space. It is important to know what each of these is, so you know what you're comparing when looking at options. Monthly visits are the number of times your website is visited in a month. A person who logs onto your homepage and goes to three other pages on your site is typically counted as one visit. A pageview is the total number of pages accessed; in the same scenario, that person generated four pageviews. Bandwidth is the volume of information transmitted to your website visitors. Your bandwidth usage will depend on both the content of your site (photos and videos use more bandwidth than text) and the number of pages accessed – the more people that access your website, the more times those images are transmitted. Storage space is more straightforward: It's the amount of space you have available to store your website and its images, videos, and text. You can reduce the need for storage by hosting photo galleries or videos on an outside service like Flickr or YouTube. When comparing hosting services, it is critical that you know what features are offered for the base price, what features are add-ons, and what the extra costs are if you go over any limits. Included features and add-ons vary greatly from host to host. You may need to take detailed notes or make a chart to compare your options. Go Mobile Hosting