{"id":333,"date":"2011-01-27T12:15:51","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T12:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=333"},"modified":"2011-01-27T12:15:51","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T12:15:51","slug":"silver-surfers-why-smes-should-not-ignore-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/01\/silver-surfers-why-smes-should-not-ignore-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Silver Surfers – Why SME’s Should Not Ignore Them"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>

\"SilverIf you read the press you may often have come across the term “silver surfer” that is used to describe the older Internet users. Indeed there are stories in July last year about the death of the then oldest twitter user<\/a> Ivy Bean with much being made of her age.<\/p>\n

While 104 year olds may be the exception, as a small business you need to think about the older internet user – for example the second and third fasted growing categories of users on facebook are males and females aged between 55 and 65.\u00a0 This indicates that there are a lot of people that are older than the typical view of the online community that could be visiting your website and buying your products or services.<\/p>\n

What does this mean to you as a small business with a website?\u00a0 Well, it is\u00a0fact that eyesight tends to deteriorate once you get past your mid 40’s so have a look at the content of your site – is it easy to read, is the font big enough and is there enough contrast between the text and the background colour?\u00a0 How many of you have visited a site where the background is black or very dark and the text is a light grey – this is proven to be a bad combination with the best colour combinations for text and backgrounds being a light background and dark text.<\/p>\n

One idea to improve this could be to allow your visitor to change the colours of the background \/ text and even the size of the text on your pages, this is done by allowing a change to the style sheet that controls the look of the page (and is something that we are actively considering here at Forest Software).<\/p>\n

Another factor that you need to consider is the language used on the pages, the older person tends to appreciate well written and grammatically correct content without any spelling mistakes.<\/p>\n

If you are using an external designer to produce a new website for you remember that the vast majority of designers are under the age of 30 and tend to think that they are the typical internet users, point out to them that there is a large proportion of the web world that does not have 20\/20 vision or even fine control over mice and that this needs to be taken into consideration, for example I have visited sites where you have to hover over the navigation to allow sub-menus to slide out and the hover seems to be very sensitive.<\/p>\n

And finally…<\/em><\/p>\n

The main reason you need to consider silver surfers when you are thinking about your website is the profit motive.\u00a0 As a small business you will find that by opening your website up to the older generation you are increasing the number of possible customers\u00a0 and therefore increasing the turnover and profit.\u00a0 Oh, and I should declare an interest in the whole subject – on my next birthday I will officially be in the silver surfer category having been working with computers for the whole of my working life (and in the web field since the mid 90’s).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>If you read the press you may often have come across the term “silver surfer” that is used to describe the older Internet users. Indeed there are stories in July last year about the death of the then oldest twitter user Ivy Bean with much being made of her age. While 104 year olds may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-advice","category-computers","category-marketing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}