When reviewing your website during a maintenance period (either refreshing or completely replacing it), it’s important that you prioritize having a mobile version of your website.

Why a Mobile Version?

In the Mobile vs. Desktop Usage in 2020 study from Perficient, most website visits are on mobile devices. If your website does not dynamically convert between a desktop and a mobile version, you may be turning visitors away when they browse your site on a mobile device.

Don’t know if you have a mobile version of your website? You can test it from your desktop!

Determining if you have a mobile version of your website

To determine if you have a mobile version of your website, you can use the browser on your desktop or laptop computer. To start this test, you need to change your browser from “full screen” or “maximized” mode to windowed mode. Now, slowly drag the width of your browser window down until it is just about the same width of your smartphone.

If you see the site dynamically change the way it looks when moving from desktop width to mobile width, you probably have a mobile site. If your site shrinks down to something you can barely read, you probably don’t have a mobile site.

Building a Mobile Site

Building a mobile site is something left to your web development team. The developer will work with your marketing and product management teams to tailor the site to the needs of the markets you serve. 

If you currently don’t have a mobile site, my guess is that your site is over 8 years old and needs to be completely replaced anyway.

What is the typical cost for a new website?

In our experience, we haven’t seen a good website with about 20 pages cost less than $10,000. Honestly, 20 pages is very small for a community financial institution. Typically, most sites are 40+ pages, putting the typical budget easily into the $15,000 to $20,000 range.

Where does the money go? Designing and programming a great website that projects your vision on how your prospective customers will be treated at your institution. You see, your website is the first impression a prospective business customer receives of your institution. If the website is old, outdated or doesn’t have a mobile version, why would a business prospect want to do business with your institution?

If the website feels outdated, is the rest of the institution outdated?

Your business and treasury management customers have no patience for old or outdated vendors – especially business owners who are under the age of 50. It’s 2022 and they expect their vendors to be technology savvy and offer cutting edge services.

So let’s get going on a mobile version of your website. Set aside a good budget for website maintenance so you can continue to serve your community for years to come.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.

When doing a review of your institution’s website and you use the hamburger menu (see image above), it’s time to review where you use it and build a better desktop website.

What is a hamburger menu?

A hamburger menu is a stack of three horizontal lines signaling to the user that there are menu selections under it. When the user clicks on the hamburger menu, a full menu appears to navigate your website. We find that hamburger menus are handy and easy to implement with modern web authoring frameworks.

When to use a hamburger menu?

Hamburger menus are best used when part of a mobile website design strategy. Most modern websites have a single version of a website which dynamically changes design based on the width of the web browser viewing the website. As the width of the browser gets narrower, the site will dynamically convert from the “desktop” version of the site to the “tablet” version, then down to the “mobile” version – all depending on how wide the browser is.

The hamburger menu is best used when the browser is at the tablet and mobile widths. On page widths which are for desktop computers, they should rarely be used.

Use Case

Let’s look at typical user of your website: A business owner. Let’s say that business owner is interested in a few business services you offer, and they navigate over to your website on their laptop.

If you have a good menu system, your homepage will display a “business services” menu item directly on the homepage, allowing our business owner to immediately find the treasury management business services you offer and read about the business services you provide your customers.

If you designed the homepage with a hamburger menu on the desktop version of the site, our business owner gets a nice-looking homepage with no obvious navigation. It stops them cold asking themselves “what now”? They must poke around at the site to get to the pages they wanted to see.

It’s All About Usability

This brings us back to the hamburger menu. While it works wonders on the mobile version of your site (I encourage you to use it), it has no place on the desktop version of your site. Your business prospects and customers will use the desktop version of the site most often and making it easy for them to find the right information quickly is important.

If you build a better desktop website, usability goes up and you won’t confuse your potential customers.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.