This article came from http://www.totallycommunications.com/ – There are very few Websites that don’t undergo at least a minor facelift at some point in their lifecycle. But a Website re-design can be a major undertaking and a substantial investment, thus the importance of ensuring it is undertaken for the right reasons.
Here are 7 good reasons why you might want to take the plunge and give your business Website a makeover:
1. Your Website looks and feels outdated
This is a fairly obvious one. If you don’t find your Website nice to look at, then neither does anyone else. An organisation's Website is quite often a customer's initial point of contact – so you want to make a good first impression. It needs to be engaging, pleasing to the eye and puts your brand’s best foot forward. If it doesn’t, users will leave as quickly as they arrived.
2. Your Website is difficult to navigate
Similar to the look and feel of your Website, if users find it difficult to navigate your Website and can't find what they are looking for, they will promptly leave. They are usually searching for something specific and if not easily found, then you're road-kill on the information super highway.
3. Your Website is not optimised for SEO
Does your site rank well for the keywords people are using to find the products and/or services your business provides? If not, chances are your site may not play nice with search engines and has not been properly optimised, resulting in your business missing out on lots of potential traffic.
4. Your Website has slow performance
The load-time of your Website should be within seconds. If your site takes longer than five seconds to load, people can become disinterested and will leave (particularly if they have to navigate through a number of pages to find what they are looking for). Large images can cause slow loading of pages, as well as videos, JavaScript, HTML errors or even a sluggish server.
5. Your Website is not mobile-friendly
Can your Website be easily viewed on all devices, from desktops to smartphones and tablets, without hindering the experience? If you cannot confidently say “yes”, then you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for business. With mobile devices set to overtake fixed internet access by 2014, it's vital your Website is mobile-friendly.
6. Your Website is hard to keep updated
It's important that the back-end content management system (CMS) used to maintain your Website is easy to use. The whole point of a CMS is to enable non-technical people to make updates and changes to your web content easily. Badly designed systems however, can frustrate users with poor accessibility and usability, with the time taken to maintain your Website cumulatively adding up quickly. This can ultimately lead to a Website becoming outdated, which is exactly what you want to avoid, as an updated and fresh Website is a key factor that influences users to return.
7. Your Website does not represent your business anymore
If your business has grown in the past few years, your Website may very well no longer represent your organisation, brand, products and/or services accurately. Your Website should truly reflect your brand’s personality. Moreover, it should reflect what you are communicating to your clients/customers. How can you expect a customer to trust your Website as a secure place to purchase products and services if its design is circa 1995?
If you have read this far, my best bet is that several of the above scenarios are happening to you. If that's the case, then it is probably time to find a web design agency for your business and take it from there.
Contact us to find out how we can inject a whole new lease of life into your Website and help it to start to make a big difference in your business.
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