Top 3 Indicators it’s Time for a Website Redesign?
In this day and age, everybody and their brother has a website. With the ability to use free software to build a cookie-cutter simple websites, even the less than tech savvy people are now blogging away, trying to promote themselves to the world.
However, any of you professionals out there know that having your website up and running, plus having great content is not enough. Humans are fickle creatures and get bored easily with the “same old, same old”, tired websites that at one point were on the top of the popular reading lists and now are a memory.
So what are the indicators, that it is time to refresh/upgrade your website?
1. Out of date content
This seems like an obvious reason, but the WHY is usually harder to identify. Maybe your site has lost its direction. You have received more business in another area of your company’s expertise, and have focused on that area, but your site is still geared to your original topic.
The world is constantly changing, and with this, customer’s requests sometimes will migrate to products or services that you did not intend or perhaps did not even exist when you built your website. Perhaps your site was geared to a time sensitive topic. Like an event?
Websites that focus on specific events have a very small shelf life when it comes to user’s interests. For these sites, website redesign is crucial on a frequent basis to keep your followers and KMH Kreations has helped many clients update their tired site.
Another reason that brings in clients to us is the market that the original website was geared to, has dried up. Especially with websites that sell technology, this can happen far more that the client would like. Many times great pieces of technology are replaced by even better ones (it seems almost weekly these days) and the websites still selling the old ones are forced to redesign or risk becoming a novelty, obsolete website.
No matter what the reason, content still reigns supreme in a medium where people scan information, and leave if they don’t find what they are looking for in a quick, easy manner. Keeping your content up to date and focused is a sure fire way to keep the users on your site.
2. The look & feel is getting old.
Did you ever notice that car bodies are rounded one year, and square the next? How about the fact that cell phones kept getting smaller & smaller, but when smart phones came out with LCD screens, the consumer market was buying larger phones again?
Consumers are always searching for what is new, and when it comes to the look and layout of your website, the rule of thumb is no different. One year, its fluidic-width web pages, next the trend leans towards fixed width, contained websites.
This year it appears the designers are leaning towards website designs with fixed-width, and floating content boxes. Users who feel they are browsing new, up to date websites often comment on how they love the look, so make sure the look of your website is unique, but has all the new features users want or in some cases expect.
3. The technology is out of date
Starting off with Web 1.0 offering little more than images, text & hyperlinks, to Web 2.0 now blending into Web 3.0, with intelligent search engines, dynamic user driven content, social media integration, and plenty more bells and whistles, technology has the unfortunate effect of falling out of date rapidly. Inevitably, key integral parts of website framework must be redesigned to allow for new functionality. Social Media Integrated websites, with user driven web applications are now becoming the norm for any website to jump ahead of the pack of 266,848,493 websites reported by Netcraft at the end of 2010.
If your site does not have at least a Content Management System (CMS) with database connectivity, A Social Media Marketing Campaign, and good quality content, you do not stand a chance. KMH Kreations can offer you everything you need to redesign your website, implementing any or all of the technologies mentioned in this article, for very competitive prices.
That being said, these reasons are the top three reasons on why a website should be redesigned roughly once a year or so. One of the sad parts of life is that everything ages/weathers in some way or another, if left unmaintained, but don’t let your company’s website be one of them!
