Happy New Year to everyone, we here at Carducci Realty Group have been hard at work to modernize our website a bit. We made major changes to the design, streamlined our goals, and wanted to make it even easier for you to contact us especially on mobile devices.
So, I wanted to discuss what changes were made, why we made them and how we can now serve you even better.
No More Noise
One thing that we felt was an issue in our previous design was how overly complicated it was. There were so many issues with basic navigation on mobile devices, from finding blog posts, to our menu/navigation being too difficult to find. Our header used to look like this on a mobile device.
It was huge, causing 50% of your initial view to be obstructed by a search for a home button that in testing we found very few users clicked on. Our logo was also obstructing the menu to the point you would have missed it.
To resolve this issue we overhauled the main menu entirely to be much more streamlined.
The menu is now clearly labeled taking the guessing game out of what the three lines meant and the bulk of your screen real estate is now reclaimed to read the important stuff on our website.
Our New Site Is Faster & More Responsive Than Ever
Another issue we found in testing was our old design was a bit complicated and slow for mobile devices. Loading up our slider took too long, and after the first slide, no one ever clicked on it. This was especially true for our blog post carousel towards the bottom of the page.
To resolve this we set some very strict budgets on what could be delivered to our users to provide you the best and fastest experience on mobile.
We decided against sliders, carousels, and any script heavy service that way the moment you go to scroll on our website it was responsive.
Previously we delivered 381KB of compressed JavaScript and now we only deliver 97KB which is a 75% reduction. This, in turn, allowed our website to be fully loaded, and working on a 3G connection in about 3.1 seconds as opposed to the nearly 10 seconds it was previously.
Helpful Search Results & Better Content
We had a lot of content on our old site that didn’t make the cut and it ultimately came down to a lot of it wasn’t meeting our standards. Our FAQ page, for instance, had some questions that users never clicked on, and you couldn’t read them directly in Google. Now if you look for our FAQ page in Google you will see a drop-down of our questions and answers to get quick answers to your more frequent questions.
Additionally, a lot of our older pages simply lacked a decent amount of text content. For instance, our About Angelo Carducci page now has twice as much text as it did before and most of its noise and graphics were removed leaving only the goods (and we added a contact form to reach Angelo Directly).
What’s To Come In The Future
While we are in a much better spot than before we still have areas we need to improve upon. We want to expand our social media presence unify our branding a bit, and follow a more strict content schedule.
Furthermore, we are looking to bring you useful tools built by us for you on our website such as calculators and possibly bring back our search functionality in a more useful form.
If you have any thoughts on what you would want us to bring back or add feel free to comment below and we will consider it.