Creating a successful, integrated social media strategy takes a vast amount of preparation. A company must understand not only each platform they plan to use, but also how customers are using each platform and what they expect from the companies they follow. One company that has developed and successfully implemented an integrated social media strategy is Lowe’s. Lowe’s has focused on three social platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and the newest game player, Pinterest.

Facebook – The Base Of Lowe’s Social Media Community

The core of Lowe’s social media strategy is their Facebook page. With over 1.1 million likes (almost twice as many as the main competitor, Home Depot), Lowe’s has created a successful strategy to communicate with their customers using this social media platform.

Lowe’s leverages the best features of the Facebook timeline format by focusing on the most prominent features on a Facebook timeline page, the cover photo and the history timeline.

For their cover photo, Lowe’s uses an attention grabbing photo composed of the top pins that followers have re-pinned on Pinterest. They also tie their profile picture directly into the timeline cover photo and use it to drive traffic to their Pinterest account.

By using the extended dates available in the new timeline format, Lowe’s displays the company’s history through pictures and fun facts. To make their customers feel like important contributors to the Lowe’s Facebook page, many different photos submitted by fans are featured on the timeline.

The continued increase in ‘Likes’ of Lowe’s Facebook page is due greatly to their positive and real-time interaction with fans. Lowe’s responds to the majority of questions and comments within minutes. When a fan has a question about a product, Lowe’s not only answer the specific question, but frequently directs them back to Lowes.com and includes tips on how to use the product.

Because social media is a two-way conversation, there is always the chance that negative comments will appear. Lowe’s does a very good job responding to any negative comments by:

• Always responding quickly
• Taking the conversation offline
• Tagging the commenter in the response to make sure that he/she receives the reply

For example, to take the response offline, Lowe’s apologizes for the issue and asks the commenter to email a specific email address to correct the issue.

Twitter – Real Time Answers to Customer Questions

With over 47,000 followers, Lowe’s uses Twitter to answer customer questions and concerns, as well as spread community awareness. As with their Facebook page, Lowe’s does a great job of taking the conversation offline for any negative mentions by asking followers to email them at a Twitter-specific Lowe’s email address. They also respond to all questions, comments, and mentions, often within minutes of the original Tweet.

To create a connection between their Twitter profile and their other social media profiles, they use similar designs and color in the profile background.

Instead of trying to sell their products using Twitter, they have focused on giving back to their followers with interactive hashtag campaigns to win giftcards, such as their recent #PlantaTweet campaign. Lowe’s uses hashtag campaigns to connect Twitter users to their Facebook and Pinterest profiles as well, by offering customers rewards for “liking” or “following” them on other sites.

Pinterest – A Fun Resource for Customers

The rapid growth of Pinterest has many companies overwhelmed, but Lowe’s has leveraged the user base and growing popularity create to a strong presence on the new social media platform. With almost 7,000 followers (and growing), Lowe’s is building a strong community around their brand on Pinterest. The boards on their Pinterest profile include topics that interest all their different types of customers:

• Grilling and cooking
• Gardening and landscaping
• Home Improvement
• Interior Design
• Exterior Design
• Crafts
• Holidays

Lowe’s uses Pinterest as a resource tool for customers to find fun and new projects. For example, they have a board for grilling recipes, which includes links to both the full recipe and grills available at lowes.com. Other popular boards on their Pinterest profile are craft, landscaping, and interior design projects using Lowe’s products.

Choosing to include Pinterest in the social media strategy was a very good move for Lowe’, not only because it is the fastest growing social media platform right now, but also the majority of Pinterest users are female.

Women make up a large portion of Lowe’s customer base. They are frequently the decision makers or are very influential in making decisions regarding interior design, landscaping/gardening, and home improvement (i.e. kitchen makeover).

Why Lowe’s Social Media Strategy Has Been Successful

Lowe’s social media strategy has been a success because they appear to understand that social media is a powerful tool for creating and maintaining relationships with customers. Five features of Lowe’s strategy that makes it successful include:

• The use all three platforms to drive traffic to their site
• Uses social media as an information resource for their customers
• Uses multiple platforms to reach different types of customers
• Uses a consistent approach for responding to negative comments, regardless of platform
• Responding to all customer questions and comments quickly and in a consistent tone

More and more customers are expecting to have personal relationships with companies, whether big or small. As such, social media has become a powerful tool for companies to strengthen customer relationships like never before. Moving forward, it will become more important than ever for companies to create a detailed and integrated social media strategy to meet customer expectations.

SEO in 2012: What Changed?

When SEOs discuss changes to their optimization strategy, conversation tends to focus on “quality content”. The Panda Update, which penalized ad-heavy websites with “thin content”, went live in February 2011, and continues to cause grief for spam peddlers. This update, as well subsequent tweaks over 2011 and 2012, have pushed webmasters to develop higher quality content using rich media, as opposed to churning out nearly duplicated pages with unique titles (e.g. “How to Roast a Turkey“; “How to Cook a Christmas Turkey“; “How to Cook a Thanksgiving Turkey“).

Learn more about writing content in a post-Panda environment »

Penguin Update: The Over-Optimization Penalty

The recent “Penguin Update” of April 2012 targeted “webspam”, as Matt Cutts calls it simply. This update mostly affected on-site content, and is commonly referred to as “the over-optimization penalty”. Offending webspam tactics include classic black-hat SEO schemes (keyword stuffing, automated linkbuilding, “cloaking”, scraper websites that copy original content).

Above all, webmasters should be mindful of commonly “over-optimized” elements, such as title tags, alt tags, and on-page copy that uses keyword density as the metric of success.

Learn more about the Penguin Update at Search Engine Land »

Structural Changes to SEO: Semantics Rule

Image via Flickr user dullhunk

In terms of leading edge (or “bleeding edge”) SEO tactics for 2012, Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have received most of the spotlight, while structural opportunities have not seen such fanfare. Regardless, implementing SEO best practices for 2012 includes a number of structural developments, including:

These structural tactics are simply new opportunities to tackle classic SEO issues – improving internal linking structure, making HTML more meaningful, and tracking user activity to attribute growth in search traffic and increases in SERPs with specific tactics.

The Semantic Web: Schema.org

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! have been pushing for webmasters to implement semantic markup on their websites since February 2011, when a standard markup called Schema.org was introduced. Schemas provide better semantic markup for search engines by defining properties of a person, place, or thing, by using existing HTML elements.

One practical use of Schema.org tagging would be to label information about a company (Schema.org/LocalBusiness). Using semantic markup, the three major search engines can easily identify relevant information about the organization, such as address, telephone, hours of operation, type of business, and more. Schema tags can then be used to link this organization to other entities, such as the owner of the company and his colleagues, to build a web of semantic information.

For local SEO and location-oriented search results, Schema.org markup can help increase a business’ search engine ranking by illustrating its importance through relationships to other entities.

Read about Schema.org and Local SEO tips »

Author Information in Search Results: rel=”author”

Search results with author information are more eye-catching than the results above them

Including author information in search results has been shown to increase click-through rates dramatically by highlighting the result and putting a face to the article. Additionally, the result includes a link to the author’s other posts. Though this won’t increase search engine ranking, it has been shown to increase click-through rates because of the link’s heightened profile.

How Author Information Works

To implement author information in search results, webmasters need to add a link from a post to the author’s profile or bio page using the rel=”author” attribute. The author’s profile or bio page must also link to a Google profile, which allows the author’s photo to appear next to results. Finally, the author must link from their Google profile to the author page to complete the circle.

Recent studies have shown that approximately 17% of all queries include author information within the top 100 results. It’s no surprise that Google favors its own products, and with its vested interest in their social network Google+, promoting results that feature author information will in turn promote Google+ usage. Though its usefulness as a social network is in question, going along with Google+ integration appears to be an effective way of leveraging search results.

BONUS TIP: Integrate Social and SEO Metrics into Google Analytics

Though this final tip does not directly impact SEO, it can help webmasters capture the value of social media by measuring its impact on conversions and correlating activity to SEO success. Additionally, by tying social actions and robust ranking data to Google Analytics, traditional web metrics can have greater context.

When properly implemented, the social and SEO reports found in the new Google Analytics track a number of new and useful metrics:

• Facebook Likes
• Facebook Unlikes
• Social plugin use (Tweet Button, Share This)
• Social Visitor Flow

Beat Your Competitors by Monitoring Changes for New Opportunities

SEO is a dynamic playing field that changes regularly, so it is critical to monitor new opportunities as they take on significance. The tactics outlined above are fairly new, and those that implement early will enjoy high rankings above their competitors. As Google focuses on improving the quality of its search results, other search engines will undoubtedly follow its course, and look to adopt the same new ranking factors to provide the best quality results for their users.

A Better Understanding of the “What” and “Who” of IA

A main takeaway from Donna’s presentation was how much work goes into the creation of successful information architecture. As mentioned more than a few times in our IA Summit blog posts, the process of IA planning can be more involved than actual project implementation.

IA is a Theory

There are few “right” or “wrong” answers when it comes to IA. Each project and audience has its own specific context and needs to be addressed by the IA team, which can be found through insights from user research and other IA exercises. Both quantitative and qualitative insights can be of value, as long as all projects are viewed through the filter of the end user.

People Think in Topics – Not Format

Identifying pertinent topic areas is an important aspect of designing navigation or other IA components. It will be valuable to arrange information based upon the user’s expected needs, allowing for a greater ease of flow through a website or other structure. Likewise, it is important to remember page body is a valuable aspect of navigation and site structure, while breadcrumbs serve as a great navigational tool.

Categories equal Concepts

Across the many interesting and insightful presentations given at the 2012 IA Summit in New Orleans, a particular concept continually arose – context.

What is Context?

Context encompasses the situation-altering details surrounding an event, or to paraphrase Emily Wengert of HUGE in Brooklyn: At the coffee shop, cream and sugar are found together, while in the dictionary and at the grocery store, they are not – the relationship between the two differs based on the context of the situation.

Approaching user engagements from the perspective of context will generate better insights into the actual needs of the user (as related to different user situations), and can be crucial to multi-platform engagement success.

Forgetting Context Leads to Embarrassing Engagements

Design with user context in mind.

Some deficits in contextual thinking are obvious in hindsight:

• Tweeting links not suited for mobile devices (data shows most Twitter users do so through smartphones)
• Having small (font-wise) or lengthy text on outdoor billboards (difficult to read from a distance or at 70mph)
• Placing QR codes at the bottom of a transit billboard (instead of eye level)

Designing based on user context will lend to the creation of content and information architecture that is adaptable to meet user needs and expectations.

Likewise, predicting user expectations will result in a higher likelihood of delighted and engaged users (aka. loyal customers).

Good User Engagement Requires Proper Planning

Understanding structural capabilities, content requirements, & interface platform capabilities are key to designing for good user engagement.

Often, designing with the perspective of user content requires a planning process that the same or equal to implementation in terms of complexity and phase length.

These efforts will likely include, but may not be limited to: consumer research, platform selection/testing, and content planning. Combined, these aspects craft the all-important user experience.

Often times, the central tenants of successful planning focus of three more general, yet mutually integral, components:

Structural Capabilities

Every media format is to a certain degree limited to a set of straightforward capabilities. For print, these aspects include color versus black-and-white, quarter-page versus full-page, etc. For digital, similar ad size specs are employed; however, in the case of more robust intranet or external website creation, considerations such as content management system come into play. In all cases, structural constraints will be to a certain degree influenced by overarching resource considerations, rather it be budget or the manpower for long-term upkeep and maintenance.

Content Requirements

No matter the communication goal, a specific type and format will be required for the successful transfer of ideas and calls-to-action. First and foremost, planning must assess the all-important “What do we need to say?” and “Who do we need to say it to?” considerations. Once these aspects are clearly defined and articulated, limitations and capabilities must be weighed to determine ultimate content type (text, image, video, audio) and presentation. To revisit the idea of outdoor (which can be very similar to a mobile-based headline), vivid conciseness will be of absolute importance. In regard to a robust intranet or website, effective content must usually be complex and approachable, while at the same time as updateable as possible.

Interface Design Capabilities

Ultimately, structural capabilities and content requirements must culminate into the most effective interface design possible. The way in which information is structured and presented for by-user absorption and action will often dictate ultimate failure or success. Successful user interfaces have the ability to effectively articulate messages “here and now”, while remaining inherently responsive to changing requirements, whether dictated by evolving communication goals, user behaviors, or other resource/asset considerations.

As a result of these three vital, yet inherently unique, components, proper planning is multi-departmental by nature. The typical team may include strategy, media, programming, and design experts, as well as client service liaisons and analytics experts. This “all hands on deck” approach may represent a substantial front-end investment for effective project kick-off and implementation; however, the ultimate goal and effect of successful information architecture is undeniable – short-term impact and long-term agility.

In the end, any communications plan should focus on the ever-important considerations of “when, why, where, and how”; however, due attention to the multi-faceted “context” (the connective tissue of “when, why, where, and how”) should always be an utmost priority.

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Held on a scenic levee overlooking the Mississippi River, the annual event raises money to benefit OHS’ pediatrics and nursing education, as well as Elmwood Fitness Center’s sports teams. Warm and blue skied, it was the perfect day to get out and be healthy, all while supporting an important local cause.

Search engines have always espoused the value of the user experience. For years, Matt Cutts and other engineers at Google have been encouraging webmasters to “write for people, not for search engines“. This call-to-action is just as relevant today as Google plans to penalize low-quality websites and content farms benefiting from over-optimized pages.

Information Architecture (IA) & SEO are inherently connected (image provided by flickr user cannedtuna)

With the help of human “quality raters”, Google is starting to take user experience queues into consideration. Qualitative traits like ease of navigation, trustworthiness, and consistency are becoming meaningful and important ranking factors.

To appease search engines (and users) that evaluate the user experience, web designers and search engine marketers need to make sure that content follows these principles of good web design:

1. Easy to read
2. Easy to navigate
3. Easy to find (before and after arriving)
4. Consistent layout / design / labeling
5. Quick to download

In today’s blog, I will focus on how these principles affect a website’s information architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO).

Making Easy-To-Read Content

As you review your site’s content assets, ask yourself some questions to gauge how search-engine friendly it is:

• Is it well written?
• Is it easy to scan?
• Are you using the language of your customers?
• Does the content make sense within a search listing?

While writing your keyword-focused content, make sure visitors can quickly read and understand it to encourage positive engagement. If users see language that they are comfortable with (i.e. keywords from their search), they feel validated and more likely to complete a successful visit.

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Making Your Site Easy to Navigate

The information architecture and website navigation should play a strong role in a website’s search engine optimization strategy. Users should be able to figure out where they are quickly and whether they can find the information they’re looking for. Because users rely on first impressions, the landing page needs to match what their intended query implies.

“Orientation” in Half a Second

When a user lands on a webpage through a search engine, they will attempt to “orient” themselves to determine a page’s usefulness. Breadcrumbs, contextual links, and other helpful navigational queues will help validate the visit and encourage greater rates of conversion.

Ideally, the orientation process should happen within half a second. If it takes longer to learn how to use your website, they are likely to abandon due to frustration.

Designing the Navigation

One way to make your site easy to navigate is to make sure the navigation is prioritized according to how the user sees your brand or product, and how it applies to them. Regardless of the type of website (e-commerce, informational, news or blog site), make sure information architecture matches the user’s search patterns.

Making links as plain and obvious as possible can also help make a site easy to navigate. If a link doesn’t look like a link, users may find themselves confused and unable to find their way around. Once they leave, they will likely go back to the search results and hit the competitors’ site, and only a small percentage of visitors will return after abandonment.

To make sure users can easily find the right content, make sure navigation items have the following characteristics:

• Clickable
• Scannable
• Distinguishable from body type

Making the navigation obvious and guiding users through your site allows your website to encourage more conversions, increase engagement, and retain more users for longer visits.

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Architecting Easy-to-Find Content (Before and After Arrival)

Website navigation strongly impacts search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

It is important to ensure that content is easy to read and navigate; however, the value of these qualities will be lost if content isn’t also easy to find. How to you implement smart information architecture, influencing visitors both before and after arrival? Here are some recommendations.

Promote Content Properly

To get the most out of your content, make sure it’s being promoted in all the proper channels, and also make sure the on-page content is marked up in a way that will satisfy a user’s visit quickly.

Make sure you’ve covered your “content discovery” basics by doing the following:

• Indexing the right content in search engines, optimized for verticals like “image” and “video”
• Submission to relevant, niche directories
• Submission of local listings for third party citations
• Promotion through press releases, news websites, and blogs

Ensuring visitors can find content after they’ve arrived at the site is important as well. The main reason customers will abandon a website is because of navigation difficulties. Once they’ve left, there’s an extremely low chance of winning that visitor back; while retargeting advertising may be one reasonably successful approach, it’s more cost-effective to ensure visits are efficient and valuable.

By making your navigation and information architecture reflective of what the user needs, you can increase the odds of retaining that user and producing a successful visit

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Consistent Layout, Design, and Labeling

With perceived trust being considered as a ranking factor, consistent layout and navigation becomes important to SEO. Consistency helps users feel confident in a website, as they can reliably find their way around and understand the content more quickly. It also contributes to a coherent and meaningful experience that helps strengthen the brand.

Consistency in design also helps strengthen a website’s rate of conversion. When users can reliably find their way around, visitors are more likely to complete their goals as visits become more efficient and less confused.

Strong Labeling of Items

Labeling (i.e. the words used to connote navigation items and product lines) should be consistent to how the user approaches your niche. By using the same language (i.e. keywords similar to those used to find the site), visitors can feel validated and more confident in a transactional experience.

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Quick to Download

While a site’s download speed is considered a ranking factor, there is not a great amount of perceived weight associated with it. That said, a site’s download speed is important to a user’s experience, and if they cannot find what they want quickly, the website is regarded as “slow”. Slow sites do not gain confidence from users, and hinder a user’s prospective transaction.

Download speed is easily tracked within Google Webmaster Tools, a free and easy-to-setup web application that provides a number of helpful alerts, including server errors, search engine click-through rates, Sitemap management, and more. Use this tool to make sure you are successfully monitoring download speeds or potential problems.

Focus On The User

A well-constructed information architecture should result in a site that effectively guides more users to complete their intended goals, as well as ranks highly in search engines. Because the architecture of a site affects the internal linking structure and prioritization of content, it heavily impacts a site’s SEO. To save time and money, it’s important that site owners get it right from the start.

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The wetlands in and around southern Louisiana have traditionally provided those who live here with food, livelihoods, and protection by reducing storm surges from hurricanes. Knowing the importance of Louisiana’s natural resources upon our local and national economy, and the impact a major storm has upon our livelihoods and those in the rest of America, I was excited to be able to help protect and preserve Lake Field for the people who use it and the plants and animals who live there.

On the chilly Saturday morning of March 10, 2012, a team from Mudbug donned rubber boots and met in Lockport, ready to try and do some good. After meeting with Joseph Dantin, the BTNEP Public Involvement Coordinator, we got in boats to take us to a camp on Lake Fields, which would be our base of operations. After divvying up the sections of the lake that needed to be cleaned, and outfitting ourselves with safety equipment, we separated into small teams and headed to different parts of the lake.

I was partnered with Joseph, and we began our cleanup around the northern area of Lake Fields. We rode along the lake shore, a tricky task due to inconsistent water depths, hidden logs, and the plethora of non-native and aggressive hyacinth plants clogging our path, as well as our boat’s motor. When we would spot debris, Joe would drive our boat as close to the debris as possible, and I would either reach out for the debris or jump from the boat and walk along the more dense marsh grasses to collect the beached trash. To make this task trickier, much of the debris consisted of “floats” from crab traps – repurposed 2 liter bottles that are tied to crab traps in order to mark their underwater location. Abandoned by their owners, these floats have since tied themselves to plants, logs, and other debris in the area, making their extraction very difficult.

From surveying the lake shore, we found numerous bottles, buckets, freezers, a kiddy pool, and literally, someone’s front door. These items were also filled and covered with mud and water making them very heavy to move. Many of these items were banked on higher land as a result of flooding from past storms. That being said, a large portion of the items we collected were there because of human negligence. We found a large number of old tires and abandoned boats buried in the mud and hyacinth plants. Due to this improper disposal, the lake was transforming into a dumping ground, creating an unsafe environment for the animals who live there, as well as water hazards for those who use this area recreationally.

At the end of the day, we removed 5.5 tons of trash, over 100 tires, and 14 derelict vessels from the lake. Throughout it all, we were rewarded with delicious chicken-salad sandwiches, many new friends, and a healthy appreciation for our wetlands and what we need to to do protect and preserve them.

More photos of the day’s events are available at Flickr.

To learn more about Mudbug and our volunteerism, please visit our Good Deeds page.

To volunteer with BTNEP, please visit their website.

Attendees managed social media implementation for companies in many different industries, including automobile, restaurant, retail, and education. Due to the variety of industries and expertise levels represented, insightful conversations developed, shedding light on the evolving standards and practices in the social media realm. See more below on topics covered during the conference.

What do you want to achieve?

Before starting social media, it is important to determine your goals in order to develop a social media strategy. Your goals may include:

Once goals have been established, a strategy can be developed to target your specific audience.

What your social media kit should include

Social media is not a single arena; it is a combination of many different platforms, with varying audiences. A social media kit includes different platforms including blogs, social conversation sites, social profiles, business profiles, search tools, social bookmarking sites, photo sharing sites, and video hosting sites. You may or may not include platforms from each category, as it will be very important to determine which platforms are right for your business. A kit will also include tools to manage the different social media platforms, including automating and mobile blogging tools.

Writing for social media

Content writing for social media is very different from writing content for your website, especially since you may have a text limit, such as a tweet which only allows 140 characters. A few key items to remember when writing for social media are:

Realistic required time commitment

While there are many tools available to help you manage multiple social media platforms, it is important to remember that social media never turns off. People will have the ability to comment, tweet, and post about your company 24/7, so a significant amount of time is required to not only post messages but also monitor responses. This allotment will vary greatly, depending on your company’s goals and the variety of platforms used.

Measuring return on investment

Social media is still a young media outlet, and consistent standards for measuring return on investment have not been established. The metrics for measuring the return on investment will correspond directly with your social media goals. Metrics may include increased site traffic, comments, inbound links, page views, or subscribers.

Managing your online reputation

One of the biggest concerns that companies have when considering social media, is how will they control their brand name. This is a valid concern and is one of the key components of a social media strategy. There is always the risk of negative comments, but the goal is to turn the negatives into a positive for your company. Handle the situation correctly and you many not only save a relationship with a customer, but you may also gain new customers. When managing brand reputation, it is important to consider:

There are many different monitoring tools available that can help streamline brand management efforts. There are both free and subscription based tools that you can use. Tool selection will be based on your goals, number of platforms, and number of followers/mentions.

Once you dig through a thousand icons for the ten or so that you need for a project, you need to fiddle with the sizing of them, and then clutter up your HTML with a bunch of <img> elements. While there’s nothing hard, or really time consuming about this, I’ve always found it a bit more involved than it needed to be, and things only get worse when you need to resize the icons. Maybe half way into a project you realize those icons all need to be bigger, or smaller, or you need them at multiple sizes. Do we really need three separate files just for three sizes of an icon? What if after all that, the client wants to change the color scheme of the site, and the icons no longer match? Suddenly you can find yourself recreating dozens, if not hundreds, of assets for something that seems like a simple change.

Whether you’re a designer, a developer, or even a client getting a website made, what you really want are assets that are scalable, so they can be as flexible as the website is, and adapt based on user or client feedback. What we need is a single icon that can grow and change size at a moment’s notice, and ideally, change color as well.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are one approach to this problem, but for all the buzz worthiness, the pitfalls out weigh the awesomeness. Vector graphics are infinitely scalable (yay!), but there’s nothing magical we can do to change the color on the fly, and browser support is iffy at best.

There is another solution that’s rapidly been gaining in popularity that addresses all of these issues, and it’s called Icon Fonts. With an Icon Font, you have a single file where instead of a bunch of letters making up the font, you have icons instead. You might type the letter “B” but you’ll get a bicycle instead. After all, as far as the computer’s concerned, a B is just as hard to draw as a bicycle.

Once we treat icons as letters, the advantages and possibilities start to become apparent. Just like letters, they can be any size you need them to be, or any color, or accept any fancy CSS3 text effect property so you can even add back some of the pizzaz if you don’t want a flat color, or be positioned in any way. Because all the icons are in one file, it can be compressed more and load faster, which is especially great on mobile devices. And of course, just like text, these Icon Fonts work in every browser, even ol’ Internet Explorer.

As awesome as all that is, my favorite aspect of Icon Fonts is the scalability. In the desktop computing world, despite the growing size of screens, screen resolution has been roughly the same for well over a decade. But in the mobile world, screen sizes and their resolutions are all over the place. When using non-scalable images, this can be a headache as one phone might display something nice and crisp, yet another phone has to scale it up, so it looks blurry. This is especially important on high resolution screens, such as the Retina Display found in the iPhone 4/4S and the new iPad 3. Traditionally, you’d need to make higher resolution files to compensate for this, but with Icon Fonts, they’ll just scale up to be as big and sharp as they need to be.

All that said, there are some drawbacks of course. Just like with text, Internet Explorer isn’t great at how smoothly it shows Icon Fonts, so you need a little more consideration to get it looking great, and if you need it really small, there might not be anything you can do to make it look good. Screen readers for the visually-impaired also have trouble looking at an Icon Font and seeing the icon instead of its base letter — we see a bicycle, but the screen reader sees a B. There are ways around that, but hey, that’s another show blog post.

With all these new mobile devices, and their bespoke screens and resolutions, we need everything to be scalable, so they can adapt for their displays. Text has always been scalable, and now Icon Fonts let our fonts become scalable as well. The more scalable, the fewer assets we have, so development is faster, updating is faster, performance is better, and appearance is sharper and prettier across hundreds of devices.