Quicker, easier to use and better looking… Introducing the new SwitchboardFREE

We are always doing our utmost to improve the system and our services in order to make SwitchboardFREE the only logical choice for professional, inbound call management.

With that in mind, our web design team have been working hard over the past few months to develop a new look and feel for SwitchboardFREE. Along with this redesign we have streamlined the way our website works. Though it will offer everything it always has, it will now do it in less time and with greater efficiency.

How will these changes affect you?

These changes have been made from direct feedback and with all of our users in mind.

For our existing users we have taken every effort to keep everything in its proper place so that although there is an updated look to the website, you are not going to have to spend time trying to figure out where everything is again. Our key aims with these updates is to make things easier not harder, so you should find information is now easier to find and your experience of using the system should overall be much faster and smoother.

For our new users, we have made an effort to make the transition between never having used SwitchboardFREE before to being an advanced user as simple and quick as possible.

So what are these changes?

1 – Responsive design

One of the key areas that has been in need of improving on the SwitchboardFREE website is how we cater for our visitors who come to us via a mobile device. Our online statistics show that with every passing day more people are moving away from their desktop computers and laptops and moving to their mobile phones and tablet devices. Over the past year, we have found that overall traffic via a mobile device has risen by 23% and the number of new users that have visited our site via a mobile phone has grown by 33%.

To put these statistics in context, our overall traffic from a desktop browser has actually reduced by 9% and the number of new users who have visited our site via a desktop computer has only risen by 4%.

We have tried to cater for this growing mobile trend in the past by introducing the SwitchboardFREE app, and now we have included support for mobile devices on our website as well.

Our new changes will allow the website design to be adaptable so that it stays optimised for whatever browser our users are visiting us from. This should make the SwitchboardFREE experience more convenient for all visitors to our site who haven’t yet discovered the benefit of our free mobile apps.

2 – Clarity of message

SwitchboardFREE is a big service that offers a lot of great features and a high level of functionality to all of our users. Because it offers so much, it is often hard to make it clear exactly what we do right from the start and in as few words as possible.

With that in mind we have streamlined our website homepage to show what SwitchboardFREE is in its most basic form. On top of this we have added a new ‘How it Works’ page along with updated information across the site that will endeavour to make SwitchboardFREE far easier to understand and simpler to use.

3 – Improved Optimisation

Another side-effect of the huge number of features offered by SwitchboardFREE, is that in the past the site has been a little sluggish at times. We all know how frustrating it is when pages don’t load right away or when we don’t get proper feedback from our websites to tell us exactly what it is doing and to let us know that our computers haven’t crashed.

With that in mind, we have completely rewritten the SwitchboardFREE website from the ground up using as many of the latest optimisation methods as we could. Now the website is far sleeker with much quicker page load times but without losing any of its functionality.

Along with optimising our website to be faster, we have streamlined our site wherever we can to help make everything as easy as possible for our customers. An example of this would be how we have changed our sign up form as we have removed a number of unnecessary fields as well as re-arranged the form itself to ensure that it is easy for our customers to understand and fill out. We hope that such measures will allow more people to get the chance to enjoy the full benefit of SwitchboardFREE without having to worry about the hassle of lengthy forms or jumping over unnecessary hurdles.

4- Facelift

With all these other changes involved, our design team felt that it was time to give SwitchboardFREE a bit of a facelift so that it can look its best on all modern browsers.

The aim was not to completely redesign the site from scratch but to create a more refined and polished version of the SwitchboardFREE site. Our designers went through the process of analysing the old site in great detail and making thousands of little changes to improve and optimise each element of the design. All of these little changes added up to a big difference.

The new site has a much cleaner design that is bright and as uncluttered as possible. Whilst this makes the new site better looking it also has the benefit of focusing our message and making the site easier to use and understand. At all points of the redesign, we focused on the user experience above all.

So when can you expect to see these new changes?

We are going to be rolling the changes to the SwitchboardFREE site slowly over the coming weeks. We will only be driving a small percentage of our traffic to the site at first gauge our visitors’ reactions to the new site. We will be looking to make amendments and refinements based on user feedback as soon as possible so that when the site finally goes live to all of our users, it will be the best possible version of the site that it can be.

What next?

This isn’t by any means the last of the changes you will see to SwitchboardFREE in the coming months. On top of these changes we will also be looking at our iPhone and Android apps in the same detail to which we have been looking at our website. Just like the website, we will be looking to make them easier to understand, simpler to use as well as applying a bit of an app-facelift as well.

On top of this, our website is by no mean finished and we don’t think it ever will be. SwitchboardFREE has a life of its own and it’s constantly changing. In the near future we will be:

• Looking at all of our configuration and information pages once the user has logged in with the aim of optimising each of them to improve user experience further
• Creating new instructional videos for all aspects of our site to make it easier to learn how to use all of the tools that will benefit your business
• Continuing to create new and exciting offers that will allow all users the chance to benefit from all of the features of SwitchboardFREE

The SwitchboardFREE team is never still when it comes to improving our products and services for our customers. We are always working hard to create a product that will offer our users the best quality of service at the lowest possible cost.