Time for a Website Redesign?
Take a look at your current website. Does it accomplish your business goals? Does it bring you customers? Engage the site visitors? Are the calls-to-action effective? Have your business goals changed or shifted since the site was last updated?
Your website design should not only be inline with your business goals, but it also should help you accomplish your goals, whether it’s increasing sales or getting more people to sign up for a newsletter. If this is not the case with your website then it’s time for a redesign.
Technology changes fast, a lot has changed in the past few years and that includes computer monitors getting bigger, and the newer sites are designed wider to take advantage of this. Bigger monitors give a business the opportunity to get more information on a page and larger photos as well.
Many things have changed on the development side of things as well. Photo galleries, navigation techniques and the way things are coded are all much different than 4 or 5 years ago. The techniques and programs used today allow for a much smoother user experience, with faster loading pages (check you site – does it take more than 2 seconds for all the images to load?) and easier paths to get to where a visitor needs to be.
A few signs that your site may need a revamp are:
- You have a flash intro. While these were popular for a few years (for no good reason), these make the most important page on your site – the homepage – unreadable by the search engines. They are also slow loading and a general nuisance. Did you notice they always have a “skip intro” option? There is a reason for that – users want to get to your information and get what they are looking for, not see slow loading animation.
- Small old looking photos – When making sites years ago, designers had to take in account that not everyone was on a broadband connection. Some users were using a dial-up connection which loaded very slowly. Businesses did not want to lose dial-up users so designers used smaller photos to load quickly. But now the majority of people on fast broadband connections. You can now have large photos that showcase your business (For search engine purposes you still need to be mindful of file sizes, but there are ways to include great looking images).
- It’s costing you money to update. You have to call the company who made your site every time you need a text change. Big things have changed on this front. There are many Content Management options out there that let business owners and employees easily change content. We have been using Abobe Contribute successfully.
- No Search Engine Optimization. When you had your site made, did the company even mention SEO? If your site was designed several years ago it might not take advantage of the ever changing search engines optimization techniques. Today, any decent company should offer basic SEO on a new site.
- Millions of visitors, no leads. Are you getting traffic but you’re not hearing from anyone? Contact us – we can help make that happen.
- Millions of visitors, millions of questions. Are you getting a large amount of phone calls or emails with questions about your business? Perhaps some of these questions could be answered on the site, saving you time to do more important things. Create an About Us page or perhaps a FAQ - great pages for both search engines to spider and users to enjoy!
- My personal pet peeve: Animated GIF’s, sounds and music that start automatically. I am a firm believer in that nothing ever should automatically start on your site, whether it’s music, sounds or video. Annoying people never works.
Take a look at your site and go through this checklist. If several of them apply to your site then it’s time to contact someone (or us!) to talk about redesigning your site.
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