June 1, 2012

StorageFront Launches Mobile-Friendly Version of Website

Mobile traffic rises to 20 percent in first four months of 2012

Westwood, Kan. — The StorageFront.com team was not pleased with the experience for mobile users who landed on the same website as someone searching for storage on a regular web browser. With its mobile traffic quickly increasing, the self storage web marketing company launched a mobile-friendly version of the site on June 1.

Mobile traffic has more than doubled in each of the last four years, according to data from Cisco Systems Inc. StorageFront’s mobile traffic climbed from less than 1 percent in 2009 when the site launched to nearly 20 percent of its users in the first four months of 2012.

“Mobile traffic is only going to continue to grow,” Red Nova Labs CEO Dan Miller said. “It was important to us that all of our users – not just those landing on StorageFront on their desktops or laptops – have a great experience. In 2012, it is a must to have a mobile site.”

The StorageFront mobile site is built to make conversions easy. The goal was to build a mobile site focused on the search functionality. A user’s location is tracked through the phone’s GPS and local results are displayed.

“It’s geared toward being simplistic and just getting people to make a call of action instead of spending a lot of time on your phone, which most people don’t want to do,” said Lesley Latham, Project Manager at StorageFront. “They want to get it over with and get out of there as fast as possible, especially on mobile devices.”

The StorageFront website has many other tools and resources for renters such as storing tips and the ability to reserve a unit online. On the mobile site, as Latham pointed out, users want to get in and get out. So the mobile site was built with fewer bells and whistles, keeping the user experience as simple as possible.

The end goal is that users can click on the phone number of the facility where they want to rent to call the facility. Coupons are also available on the mobile site, which is more convenient than printing one off from home.

Building such a site was not new to the StorageFront developers. Red Nova Labs, which owns StorageFront, had built several mobile sites for its WebWorks for Self Storage clients. WebWorks is a service that provides website design, development, content management tools, SEO services and web marketing consulting for self storage operators. Much of the same technology from the WebWorks’ mobile sites was used for the StorageFront mobile site. The challenge was dealing with thousands of facilities.

“Yes, it was a challenge, but our developers managed to pull this off in less than two months,” Miller said. “The user-interface and experience was exactly what we envisioned. I believe the conversion rate from our mobile customers will make our efforts well worth the time and StorageFront customers will see the results.”

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming — enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.