Web Design Discussion

Your website has been online for a number of years but as you surf the net you realize your design looks out of date, is not cutting edge, uninspiring and lacks interactivity. The longer you put it off the worse you feel because you are not keeping up with your competitors who have great looking websites and are outranking you in the search engines.

5 signs your website needs a redesign

1. Outdated design

Your website is the first impression a visitor has of your business. If it looks unprofessional your visitor will leave right away. A cutting edge design makes your visitor feel as ease because it’s easy on the eyes and contains lots of great content they can interact with.

2. Lack of interactivity

Interacting with your visitors helps build relationships. Investing in these relationships builds trust and people tend to buy products from people they trust. Some ways to increase website interactivity include: RSS feeds, Social media icons to share content, op-in newsletter subscription and free reports.

3. Lack of search engine optimization

The structure of your website should make it easy for both the search engines and visitors to access your web pages. Access to information should be no more than 3 clicks away from the home page. If you want your site to be found on the first page of the search engines you need to research the keywords that people are searching on and incorporate them into your meta tags, header tags, file names, navigation and web copy.

4. Old technologies

Most old websites exclusively used tables for designing the web pages. Too many tables cause pages to load slowly and makes it more difficult to control the style. With cascading style sheets you can easily control most design elements e.g. fonts, layout, background images, navigation. etc.

5. Difficult to maintain

A static html site containing 100s of page is difficult to update unless it was built using server side includes (SSI) or built as a template using Dreamweaver. Think of the amount of time it would take to update each page if you wanted to add a link to the navigation menu. SSI enables you to update all pages at the same time by editing one file.

Alternatively you could convert your static html site to a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla then manage the content from a login administration panel. It would allow you to maintain your site from any location in the world that has an internet connection.

Related Articles
Website Redesign: Top 7 Reasons to Get a Design Makeover
How Much Does It Cost to Redesign a Website?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 8:42 am and is filed under Web Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.