Overhaul your site or just revamp it? It’s Time To Do Something.
If you are a business owner, you know how important it is to promote a positive image of your company. Keeping your customers informed about your current services and products along with new offerings helps your business grow. Keeping your website current requires an occasional website revamp and occasionally a website overhaul.
Your website is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This allows all of your customers, along with potential new customers find you any time, anywhere. When built and maintained properly, your website can grow your business exponentially.
People hire me to fix website problems. It’s often due to website code being old and outdated.
Websites need maintenance just like your home or your car.
The Internet is no longer in its infancy. Technology changes at lightning speed in this field along with standards of how to build websites. Rather than simple online brochures of text and images, websites have evolved to become complex systems. Not all websites need complex functionality, but they do need to keep up with current code standards like not using Flash technology anymore and being mobile friendly so people can see your website legibly on a mobile device.
You may think that your website has everything that it needs to be useful to all your customers. If your website has been around for several years without making any updates, you may be losing business rather than helping to promote it.
Do a Website Audit
Do you regularly, or have you ever done a website audit? Not a full blown technical review or SEO audit, but a high level to get a perspective of how your customers and potential customers see your business presented. Take a few minutes to do the following, and then do the same to your competitor’s website. (Take notes while you do this.)
- Does your website look professional, clean and up to date or does it look like it has been around many years? What date does the copyright say at the bottom of the page?
- Look at your website from your phone. Is it a duplicate, small version of what you see on a desktop, or does it resize so the menu links can be tapped easy, and text is a legible size to read without having to zoom in on the screen.
- Is your main headline on the home page “Welcome To Our Website!”? Or, does it clearly tell the user who your company is and what you do?
- Is the content current? When was the last time you made any changes to your home page, and/or all pages on your website? Are there products and services you offer that are not included? Maybe staff is referenced on the site that no longer is employed by you or you have products and services showing that you no longer offer.
- Do you have a website contact form? When was the last time that you tested submitting it and saw the message returned to the user? Did you receive an email? as it easy to submit or were there lots of required fields?
- Are you able to move from page to page quickly or does it take forever to load the page you are looking for?
If you find that your site looks dated, the pages take forever to load, or it is useless on a mobile device, then it my be time to rebuild your website. You want your website to work for your business, don’t you?
Website Revamp
You may want to consider a simple website revamp if you only need to change the following items on your site:
- Visual Appeal – Minor updates to the current website design without making significant structural changes can make a positive difference. Updating your logo, changing colors or fonts and updating photos from poor quality stock photography will freshen your website.
- Remove Dated Technology– Flash used to be used for animation on websites like slideshows, menus and sometimes the whole website. In 2007 when iPhones were launched Flash would not work. Many search engines don’t work well with it either. Other reasons to replace it are security issues, inefficiency and there are simply better ways to accomplish the same effects now.
- Update Content – If you have not updated your content within the past year, you need to make this a priority. Keeping your website current will bring visitors back, along with bring new visitors to you as new keywords on your pages will get indexed in Google and other search engines.
- Website Security – When was the last time you changed the password on your website? Never? Go do it now. How about reviewed your server error logs and files for suspicious activity? I don’t expect you to know what to do here, but it should be done (regularly). Is your website using a secure certificate? (SSL, https://…) All sites should be using this technology these days. With Let’s Encrypt many hosts are now offering it for free. (Business grade web hosting services I offer include a free SSL certificate with web hosting. )
Website Overhaul
A website overhaul is more involved, but it will be necessary if you need to change the following items on your site:
- Website Design – Design is unprofessional, outdated, cluttered and or unorganized. If users can not find what they are looking for, they will leave.
- Optimized for Mobile – Mobile friendly website design has been around for over 10 years. Since 2015 Google has been penalizing websites (by having them rank lower in the search engine results) since April 2015. If your website is not mobile friendly you are hurting your business. If your site is not mobile friendly, your website is almost undoubtedly overdue for a redesign.
- Your Website Doesn’t Function as You Need It To – People outgrow their websites. Businesses grow, websites need to grow with them. Simple brochure websites often are not enough anymore. Converting an HTML website to WordPress empowers you to be able to make content changes without depending on webmaster services to make every edit for you.
- Security – Older websites lack the security that is needed in today’s world of hackers. If you have programming your website – even a simple contact form, code should be reviewed/rewritten to today’s standards. Old websites have old code that may be depreciated. This leads to errors and completely broken web pages. If you don’t see errors, your web host is probably running an old version of PHP which can leave you vulnerable to security issues, in turn, expose your site to getting hacked. Check with your host to see how regularly they update and patch the web server, along with what version of PHP is running.
- SEO – I have not even touched on updating your website for search engine optimization. Optimizing your website should be every website owner’s priority. Everything else mentioned here is related to SEO, but just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ranking high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)
Making changes to your website is necessary in our online world, as you will want your site to be easily accessible to anyone that clicks on it. A website revamp or overhaul will not only improve your site, but it will improve your business as well. Learn more about website redesign services to improve your business website.
