Is your website showing its age? That can happen pretty quickly given the speed of innovations in the web world. Facebook and Twitter have undergone major overhauls to help users interact more efficiently and share more content. And just recently Yahoo.com made news when it revamped its homepage. How do the rest of us know when it’s the right time to redesign our websites? Our Dallas web design firm has come up with five simple questions that will tell you if it’s time to redesign.
Plenty of Internet marketing firms out there will advise you to update your website every two to three years. And while timeframes are nice, in this situation it’s better to focus not on whether your website is pretty but instead whether it’s effective. Are you driving awareness and engagement? Are people downloading your free ebooks and whitepapers? Are you generating traffic? Most importantly, are you getting leads? If too many of these answers are no, you might want to consider a redesign.
As you make a decision on a web redesign, ask yourself these five questions about your site:
1. How does your website look compared to others?
2. Does it respond to mobile devices, that is, smartphones and tablets?
3. Can you easily update content?
4. Do your site give you the ability to share content using social networks?
5. Do you have the desired level of search visibility?
We recently completed a web redesign for a client that offers shipping solutions to small and medium-sized businesses. We started off by suggesting the company add a blog to its existing website. We built a career-advice blog that had a fresh look, mobile responsiveness, email capturing capabilities, social media integration, and, most importantly, fresh new content. After completing the blog we transitioned the entire company website to the updated design. That gave us the chance to dissect every page of the site and figure out ways to improve it.
Not only can a redesign make a visual improvement to your website, but search engines will see the change and boost your search visibility. A redesign provides the opportunity to clean up outdated code, which reinforces with search engines the idea that you have a more relevant website.
So, the next time the boss stands up in a meeting and says it’s time to redesign the website, ask yourself some questions first. And don’t focus completely on how the site looks, but instead on how it works.
Tags: responsive design, social sharing, Website performance
For content updates, there are so many options from CMS’s to WordPress. The biggest thing is SEO. If your designer or design firm isn’t known for their SEO, walk away. You need SEO more than you need a fancy new logo.
All I know is you don’t want any Flash. Apple products, ipod, iphone, and ipads don’t show Flash. As well search engines can’t do anything with it either. It just looks nice for the user but how much is that little upgrade worth. Some places charge more for Flash anyway so it really is not worth it at all.