Tag Archives: mobile website

New Design, New Logo, New Possibilities

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Regular visitors to 4RoadService will have noticed that we’re sporting an entirely new design – and even a new logo! Besides improving our looks the new design is a responsive one – which means that 4RoadService.com works great to find truck repair on phones and tablets, as well as computers, and it’s fast.

Mobile-First

Our old design dated from 2008. At that point the iPhone was less than a year old and there were no Android phones yet. The mobile web was very different, the few smartphones out there were Blackberries, and if you were using the web on your phone it was probably a WAP site.

Since 2008 smartphones have saturated the world. Today over half of the people who visit 4RoadService.com do so on mobile devices so we built our new design for mobile devices first, and use Responsive Web Design to provide a desktop layout when the website is viewed on a computer. We want everyone, from the dispatcher at a desk with a 24-inch monitor to the co-driver in the sleeper with a laptop to the driver stuck at the side of the road with looking up the closest truck repair company on his phone, to find the service they are looking for quickly and easily.

Fast

Part of designing for all screen sizes is designing for all network connections. If you’re in a mountain pass with a patchy cell connection making you wait while your phone downloads images 10 times the size of the screen doesn’t help you get back on the road quickly, it’s just frustrating and possibly expensive. We’re proud that the new design is incredibly fast-loading. It’s so fast that we’ll be writing a whole separate blog post about it in a few days, so stay tuned.

Evolving

The great thing about the web is that anything can change at anytime, so 4 Road Service will keep being tuned to be faster and easier to use. If you run into problems or have suggestions please let us know with our contact form, or hit us up on Facebook or @4RoadService on Twitter.

iPhone App, Mobile Site, and Updated Homepage

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With a new mobile website, an iPhone App, and an updated, easier to use, homepage you won’t be stuck for long with winter.

The Preview Edition of the 4RoadService iPhone App has been available for a while now in the App Store, but we are looking for even more feedback. If you’ve got an iPhone try it out, then tell us what would make you use it every time you break down.

We recently launched our mobile website at 4RS.mobi. It uses the latest HTML5 technology to bring the power of 4RoadService.com to your phone or tablet. Even better, phones where the technology is available it can use the phone’s GPS and search for service providers who are close to your actual location. You no longer have to guess what city you are in. Just choose what you need, how far away you want it, and tap the “My Location” button. If your phone doesn’t have a GPS, or doesn’t support accessing it from a web page, you can use 4RS.mobi by selecting your city & state just like on 4RoadService.com, but with a design optimized for use on a phone.

Our updated home page has been designed to make searching faster and easier. We noticed that many people were clicking the “Find Road Service” tab at the top of the site to go to the search page, so we brought a bigger, faster, search page to the homepage of the site, (of course, you can still use search page if you want). Since we put the made the update live last week the new search form has been a hit – it’s now the most clicked-on item on our home page.

As always, please let us know what we can do to make it even easier to get service on the road. We know what it’s like to be broken down in the winter and want to help.