We’re Beta Testing New Version of Skiddle.com

For those Skiddle watchers out there, you may well be one of the lucky few to have already seen that Skiddle are in the process of Beta testing our new website.

Currently we’re siphoning off a small percentage of traffic to make sure the website is working as well as the existing Skiddle website. Those of you who have seen it may well ask “what’s new about it?” If you’re asking that question that means we’re on the right track!

Essentially our Development department have spent a large part of the last year rebuilding the website to allow us to create a fully responsive – which means for the first time Skiddle will be truly mobile friendly and able to deal with different screen sizes and resolutions. We took the decision to create a responsive site rather than the scaled down mobile websites to ensure Skiddle’s mobile customers continued to enjoy the full range of services they’re used to on Skiddle.

With a website as big as Skiddle, that has some 4 million pages and a great number of pages and sections that have been created over the last 12 years, this was no mean feat!

So why bother creating a new website?

In 2010 around 10% of Skiddle’s traffic could be attributed to mobile devices, in 2013 our mobile traffic is sitting at around 50% of our traffic, at the height of festival season this year, mobile traffic was more like 60%. Creating a more mobile friendly website was something we had to do.

As well as opening the website up to a small percentage of Skiddle’s users we’ve also sent the website out to a wide range of usability testers who have been busy providing us with feedback.

Below you’ll see an example of the the usability testing as well as the new website as it appears on a mobile.

[evp_embed_video url=”http://dc2.usertesting.com/videos/9121a9af.mp4″]

 

The new website is still in Beta mode but we’re hoping to get it live in the coming weeks, slowly introducing it to more Skiddle users and reviewing the new site’s performance, many of you won’t see a difference (and that’s a good thing!), however some of you who view Skiddle on a mobile device, either a mobile or a tablet might get a chance to take a look at this new leap forward.

The new responsive Skiddle.com will undoubtedly be one of, if not the most mobile friendly ticketing and events website available in the UK. For our event promoters this means as the rest of our competition try to catch up, Skiddle’s platform will enable events listed on Skiddle to sell more tickets!

We’re in the lead up now to New Year’s Eve 2013, events are being added to Skiddle every day, to appear in the New Year’s Eve 2013 Guide (http://www.skiddle.com/newyear/) make sure your events are added by visiting the Promotion Centre and be sure to keep your eyes peeled for Skiddle’s new website!