Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It
requires you to dig deep into your business in order to
write the copy for your site. You need to work with a
designer and go through the process of creating a site that
looks unique and works well. Plus you'll end up investing a
lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that,
you're finished and it's time for the site to go live. What
a relief!
Many business owners go through this same process. By the
time the process is finished, many entrepreneurs are very
glad that it's over - and don't want to do it again any
time soon.
Unfortunately, websites don't last forever. Even if you
plan your site to work for the current vision for your
business, you can't accurately account for the entire
future of your business.
Eventually you'll have to make some changes to your
website. Some of these changes can be accomplished with
simple maintenance, and by making updates to your site. But
there's only so far that patching and revising your current
site can go. If your site is particularly outdated, or if
it's not working well for you, it's probably time to
consider a full-scale site redesign.
Some signs that it's time to redesign your site include:
- Your business has changed or grown. If your business is
no longer the same as it was when you designed your site,
chances are that you should redesign your website to
reflect that. If you've only had a few small changes, you
might be able to just update your current website. But if
you've changed your business direction, decided to offer
new products or services, or if your company has grown
significantly, it will pay off to redesign your site.
Reconsider how the changes to your business should be
reflected or addressed in the structure, design and
strategy behind your website.
- Your site looks like it was designed in 1995. Some signs
of an outdated web site include: chunky, slow-loading
graphics, old-style "framed" coding, where the site is
divided up into panes that load separately, little animated
cartoon clip-art throughout the site, and text created as
images instead of in HTML. Having any of these on your site
could reflect poorly on your business, making you look
'behind the times'. It can also make you look like you
don't care enough about your business or about
technological advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping
your company's website looking modern will increase its
credibility.
- The information on your site isn't user-friendly. If you
cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly
get questions on your site text from visitors,
re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help to fix
these problems. If you've been adding to your site over
time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing,
restructuring your navigation could be another pressing
reason to redesign your site. You want visitors to be able
to easily find their way around your site and to be able to
access all the information you have within a few clicks.
Laying out your site to make that possible can make your
visitor's experience on your site a lot easier.
- You apologize for the site when referencing it or handing
out your business cards. Your site should be a source of
pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy
way to get a lot of information about your business. And if
you have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken
images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else
on your site, it makes you look unprepared and
unprofessional. Make sure your site is in top shape and
looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is
in good shape too.
- You're not getting good results in the Search Engines.
Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not
optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can
also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your
site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames
and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also
more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.
- It's not bringing in inquiries and helping you to make
sales. If your site was designed long ago, then there's a
good chance that it was designed as "brochureware". This
means that the site was designed just to act as an online
brochure. This was very common a few years ago, when
websites were new. But recently businesses have realized
that a website can do a lot more than just impersonate your
brochure - it can help you close sales, bring in new
prospects and make your business easier to run. To bring in
more inquiries and make more sales include the following
when you redesign your site:
- Calls to action to encourage your visitors to take
specific actions - like purchasing something, contacting
you, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Forms, scripts, or programs to make your business easier
- like contact forms, project estimating tools, and an
autoresponder email series that can help you keep in touch
with your clients and prospects. Including a shopping cart
or Paypal buttons on your site can also help you to make
more sales without any additional work.
-Downloadable information packets, articles, questionnaires
and white papers can answer a prospect's questions about
your products or services and help them to move closer to
buying. And if you require the prospect to enter their
email address or other contact information, it can help you
to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of
the functions that your site can perform for your business.
To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you
increase your business, look at the other sites that you
visit and note the functions they perform.
- Your site is costing you a fortune to update. If you're
racking up huge bills because of changes and still have a
lot of to go, it might be time to consider a whole site
redesign. Make a list of everything that you want to do on
your site and to consult a web designer about redesigning
your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have
extensive changes to make to your site, it can be less
expensive to just start over.
If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way
that you can't maintain it yourself redesigning and
re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Having the
ability to make changes and update your own text will let
you make revisions quickly, at no cost. And you can play
with your site and make revisions to see what will work
best for your business and clients.
If your site has any of the problems mentioned here, it's
time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise
will differ depending on the problems and issues that your
site has - you may not have to start from scratch. But, do
make sure that you address all of the problems that your
site has so that you won't have to redesign again any time
soon!
----------------------------------------------------
Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big
visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, "Design a
Website That Works", will walk you through all of the
questions that you need to answer in order to create the
best possible website.
http://www.elf-design.com/http://www.elf-design.com/products
-webWorkbook.html
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