We’re excited to announce that The McClatchy Company, America’s 3rd largest newspaper consortium, has just begun rolling out VendAsta’s mobile site platform! Even though we’ve been providing McClatchy with Reputation Management for a while now, we’ll chalk this up as a new win for our product suite.
Why the sudden rush to sell mobile sites? As mobile commerce continues to grow in popularity, small and medium businesses are in greater need of websites that help them reach current and potential customers. Did you know that over 1/2 of US cell phone owners now use their phones to look up reviews and prices while shopping in stores? (comScore 2012) Or that 20% of telecom, 30% of restaurant, and 25% of movie searches are now mobile? (Google – The Mobile Playbook) Newspaper and media companies – like McClatchy – are seeing a massive opportunity in this space, and they’re all looking to offer sites that are quick to set up and affordable to offer. Thankfully, that’s what we do best: build high quality digital products that don’t cost our customers an arm and a leg (basically we’re Ikea for websites… but with much easier assembly).
We always get asked about what we’re releasing next, so here’s a special sneak peek into our backlog. We’re pumped about what’s in the pipeline, and we hope you will be too.
1. Fully responsive design layouts: instead of having separate mobile and desktop sites, SMBs can choose a layout that reacts dynamically to their browser size.
2. Enhanced analytics for Do-It-Yourself users: SMBs that manage their own mobile sites will have full access to all of their site’s analytics.
3. Publish reviews to dedicated Review pages: businesses will be able to publish their top online reviews to their microsites and mobile sites for all of their visitors to see.
The timelines for these features are still being decided, so we can’t give out any specific release dates yet (sorry!). What we can say is that the devs are working hard, and that they’re very close. If you want more details — or to schedule a demo — contact sales@vendasta.com.
About The McClatchy Company: McClatchy owns 30 daily newspapers in 29 U.S. markets. These markets are growing 50 percent faster than the national average, and in each of its daily newspaper markets, McClatchy operates the leading local website, offering readers information, comprehensive news, advertising, e-commerce and other services.