A leading bed company is making strides for the future with its brand new mobile- and tablet-friendly website.
Despite the economic climate, bedding retailer Mattressman has expanded over the past few years. Bricks and mortar stores in Chingford, Ilford and Colchester opened earlier in the year, and the company has plans to expand across London and further afield in the future. Meanwhile, founder Andrew Kerry launched the British Bed Company, a supplier of high-quality mattresses, in 2012. Mattressman has also stayed ahead of the curve when it comes to new Internet innovations, introducing virtual tours for its stores earlier this year, courtesy of Google Maps.
But now the Norwich-based company has recognised the changing face of internet browsing, and taken things a step further by building a brand new responsive website. For people who browse the web using a mobile phone or tablet, this means no more squinting at a tiny font or endless pinching and zooming to navigate — the site cleverly adapts to your device, resizing content and optimising the layout.
Tablet and smartphone sales have dramatically increased in recent years. Almost half of the UK population own a smartphone and there are tablets such as Apple’s industry leading iPad in a quarter of households. With Christmas just around the corner, and an expected increase of over 15% on online spending from last year’s festive period, Andrew Kerry, Mattressman’s Managing Director, felt it was more important than ever to update the website to accommodate those people. Andrew said: “We noticed from the beginning of 2013 that there was an increasing number of visitors to our website via smartphones and tablets, and our site simply wasn’t optimised for these customers. We see on average a 50/50 split between desktop and mobile users, so it was vital to get our new website up and running, and I agree with industry experts that this split will continue to swing in favour of mobile over the next year. We’re very positive about our sales performance over the next 6 months, and I’m excited to see what figures we can generate through mobile over this period.”
With around half of Mattressman’s transactions being carried out online, optimising the site for tablet and mobile is a move that will benefit many of its customers. But beyond its responsive design, the site has been built with speed in mind, from a more efficient search function, to an improved filtering system, and a quicker checkout process.
The creation of the new site is an on-going process. In the coming months, the Mattressman team hope to make further improvements to the site, the intention being that, no matter what device they’re using, customers have a smooth and stress-free experience. Andrew commented: “We have some fantastic ideas in the pipeline that haven’t been seen in our industry before. This, combined with the hard work that has been put into the website over the past year, makes me very optimistic about the future.”
