Its been a well-known fact from the beginning of the .Com times, that websites age. As years go by, technology advances, standards increase and the need for a re-fresh of your brand online is essential. But before you assume it’s time to re-engineer the looks and feel of your website, it may be important to analyze a few determining factors before doing so.
Below is a list of common signs that it is definitely time for you to re-work your website:
Sign #1 – You Get Complaints from People
If you’ve recently gotten complaints from customers & viewers regarding uour website’s usability or lack of ease navigating to important pages, it’s time to analyze your current situation. There’s nothing more frustrating for users to not find what they’re looking for, and most importantly, find it fast.
Sign #2 – Nobody Can Find Your Website…Anywhere.
Now granted, if someone is searching for plumbers and they type in “contractors,” then obviously this falls on the user end of things. But your website, at the very least, should be searchable on Google for the top keyword searches in your industry. If you’re not even on the map, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and map out a new and effective marketing plan.
Sign #3 – Your Website Doesn’t Reflect Your Current Branding
We’ve seen this time and time again where a business will go through a re-branding phase, but that never translated into updating their website’s look to match. Branding consistency is such a vital part of your image, so if you find your current brand to be much better than what’s on your website, it’s time to update the site.
Sign #4 – Your Site is Packed Full of Useless Information
Back in the day, it was about cramming as much content on each page of your site as possible. The theory was that the more content you can give Google, the better. In today’s standards, it’s about quality over quantity. So even though a page with scarce amount of content won’t help you, a happy medium which includes powerful marketing language and helpful information to your audience is more important than writing an online novel for your website.
Sign #5 – Mobile Friendly – Is Your Site?
This is probably the most important of them all. As of April 21st, 2015, Google once again re-hashed their search algorithm by splitting the way they rank sites in half. Desktop & Tablet searches on one end, and mobile searches on the other. Websites that don’t have a dedicated mobile version or aren’t “responsive,” will rank lower than those that are mobile-optimized. Google put these changes in place to help create the best user experience for customers and reward the websites that make it easier on their customers in return.
Contact your team at Thrive for questions or for more tips on re-designing your company site!
Until Next Time,
Josh Olswanger
Thrive Web Designs – Your Boise Web Design Team
