Wearable Technology

At this year’s event a considerable number of stands were focused on smart watches. A decade ago the idea that a watch could do anything more than keep time would have seemed like science fiction, but advances in technology have opened up a whole new world of possibility.

Sports Watches

Some of the smart watches operate like personal trainers. They sit on your wrist whilst you take part in your sport or activity of choice and provide a wealth of data from your route and distance covered to your heart rate and calories burned. The show included the HTC Grip and the Leap+, both of which include GPS and sports tracking functionality.

Business Watches

The LG Watch Urbane, Pebble Time and Huawei watches are some of the watches on offer that put smart technology on your wrist. With WiFi access, GPS and voice activation technology, they have the potential to transform connectivity over the coming years. These watches can connect with phones, tablets and possibly other technology in order to provide a convenient way to access apps, check emails, take pictures and navigate to a destination.

The Future of Wearable Technology

Although the first smart watches were launched in 2013, it is early days for this technology, yet we are already seeing great developments to make them increasingly practical and useful. There is already research into how wearable technology could play a crucial role in the delivery of personalised healthcare, such as reminding elderly patients when they are due to take medication, to monitoring the blood sugar levels of diabetes patients. As developments continue the possibilities will evolve in many more directions.

Whilst at present it is likely to be early adopters and gadget fans who buy the smart watches that hit the market this year, we could all be ordering one in a few years, when advances have made the technology more valuable and affordable.

Is Wearable Technology Important to your Business?

Whether we are ready to embrace this technology or not, the important factor is that we accept that mobile technology is going to play an increasing role in communication. As business owners, we may not choose to buy wearable technology ourselves, but we have to be open to the idea that our customers might be adapting their habits with the availability of mobile technology.

If we want to communicate with our customers, we need to adapt our methods of communication to best suit those customers.

The rate of change is fast, but rather than thinking we need to keep pace with the latest technology, what we should be aiming for is to meet the changing needs of our customers. If your business website has yet to be converted to a mobile responsive site, how are you providing a good online service?

Mobile responsive website designs are a necessity, not an option. Take action now and be prepared that it may need revisiting in another year or two in order to deliver what your customers are looking for.

Evolving Website Design

Looking back a decade or two, a website design was a relatively static online marketing tool, but things have changed. You may have spent months planning and preparing the content on your current site, expecting it to last for many years, but now it is important to regularly add fresh content to your website pages.

The cost of a website design has dropped considerably in this time too, so it’s affordable to embrace change. You website pages need to be updated regularly and its design and functionality should be reviewed every year. A static website offers little value to your loyal customers and will struggle to attract new ones. However, an evolving website design, with fresh, relevant and valuable content being regularly added will help you to meet your customer’s needs and allow your website to gain and retain a good position in the search engine listings.

Urban Media has been building business websites since 1997. We’ve had to adapt to changes in online marketing and technology to ensure we deliver a great website design service to our customers. By keeping pace with technology, we can help you to deliver a great service to yours.