Moral Support. Where the Web Went Wrong

If you’re into keeping an eye on your clicks, impressions, searches and such then I expect you’re noticing the same things I am.

Search impressions are way way up! People are asking google everything. But clicks are right down. The search engines are summarising things well enough that often users are happy enough just to see the search results page. Then there’s another weird effect. These people are really often coming directly to Deltastring.com some time later! We’re all doing a search, getting some info, making a shortlist (mental or otherwise) and then we’re coming back to this line of enquiry after some gestation period.

Newsletter clicks are also dropping. No, this isn’t just because my own newsletters are increasingly rambling! I speak to humans who output more more consistent structure and they are finding that the ratio of subscribers to actual impressions is getting worse. I think this is because we’re all subscribing to more and more things but we don’t have any additional reading time!

It’s a similar issue with the Xbox Game Pass. The price shooting up did catch my attention. There are more games available, it’s true. Doesn’t give me any more time to play them! What happened was it gave us all a moment to do a quick evaluation. I cancelled the subscription. Might even take the console itself to CEX. Bad decision, Microsoft!

Here’s the Zendesk bit

I think people would click through from searches more often if websites themselves were less bad. I’m not saying the web was beautiful from 1995-2005 but it was a lot more readable! Now by the time you’ve closed the cookie notice and the terms of service and the adverts and then “content unavailable in your region” and then waded through the SEO wordy nonsense, you have forgotten what your first question was. Maybe this is a sign I’m getting old, but we all use the web and I think we all can agree it isn’t great.

Well what I do is Zendesk stuff and so that’s where I can make a difference.

We’ve taken Bootstrap, which is the world’s most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first sites, and rebuilt it for Zendesk help centres. We’ve maintained the proper ARIA implementation, so it’s assembled with accessibility at the core. Sreen readers work correctly. Keyboard navigation makes sense. Colour contrast passes WCAG AAA standards.

We’re talking mobile-first design. It’s not tacked-on responsiveness but ideal for any device.

The performance has been the real effort. So many loading optimisations, stripping out the things which aren’t required, seriously quick.

Every theme has a modern aesthetic. The Deltastring engine gives such flexibility for customisation and is a solid foundation for making your Zendesk help centre a coherent part of your web presence.

Finally, the SEO improvements. Google cares about speed and accessibility! This will help your support content rank, which means your customers get good information and therefore additional deflection when they can self-serve easier. Now for a challenge

Open an incognito Chrome tab, open the element inspector, generate a Lighthouse report for desktop and another for mobile. Is it less than perfect? Then you’ve got a good opportunity here.

This is what excellent looks like! Chrome gives you fireworks when your site scores 100/100/100/100. Nice!

Your help centre is probably leaving performance on the table right now. Slower loading times increase bounce rates. Accessibility gaps exclude customers. Sub-optimal scores affect SEO. Mobile experience could be faster. Get in touch and we will show you more, or check out our dedicated Deltastring themes page.

The future of Moral Support

I think we need to be realistic and admit that Linkedin newsletters are not the effective tool for having conversations they were a year or two ago. My feeling is that mixed content (video first, but with audio and plaintext options) is going to work better for us over the coming months.

You know I like to build in public, I think it’s always worth discussing these things outside of our Deltastring organisation. What are you finding and what do you think?