Should I Consider A Re-Design For My Website?

Rebranding and facelifts are a common practice in business as we all know. In September 2015 Google changed it’s logo to keep up with the times & Apple finally gave their iOS design a rework after many years of criticism and speculation from the design community. Many businesses don’t pay much attention to their websites after launch, so we thought we’d give you a checklist to see if you might be in need of a facelift for your internet presence. If your site has been live for more than 12 months, then definitely glance through this list.

Does Your Site Match Your Current Company Branding?

Your website needs to clearly reflect your company’s current identity. If you’ve had any kind of update to your visual image, or are looking to rebrand in any way then you’ll need to be sure that your website is in sync with your new designs and messages. If you fail to update your site then you you can lose customers due to confusion about whether they are visiting the correct website. If your business is suffering from a lack of uniformity, take action sooner than later.

Have You Compared Your Site With Your Competitors?

In a competitive marketplace a website must be redesigned more frequently to capture and hold customers attention and build loyalty. This can mean that redesigning your site may need to happen every 12 months and sometimes more often. In markets that are not as competitive, the gap between website redesigns can be stretched to up to 24 – 36 months. With these longer gaps one must still be conscious of other changes taking place with technology and search engines as mentioned above. A partial website redesign (restructuring the backend without drastically changing the appearance) may be appropriate in these cases to stay competitive online.

One of the beauties of the internet is that you can keep pace with what others in your industry are doing quickly and easily from your computer. If your marketplace is a competitive one, then you need to place more emphasis on staying ahead of the pack in order to get more attention and build some brand loyalty. In some cases website redesigns and even tweaks can end up happening on a regular basis. This is all dependant on changes within your industry, and the type of customers you serve. E-commerce stores frequently require ongoing attention due to new products and different type of offers happening regularly. If your site doesn’t need to have any actual design changes for a while, you still need to stay on top of things by keeping pace with changes to SEO and things like mobile devices and having a website that has a respectable loading speed.

Does You Website Function Properly On Current Browsers?

If you’re not exactly the kind of person who is likely to keep pace with web browsers ( i.e. 99% of the planet!) then you can just hop over to www.3schools.com which will give you an easy to understand read out of which browsers are going up and down in the usage charts.

Internet browsers are being regularly updated  in order to deal with things like web security and changes own technology. One big issue here is older hardware and software becoming obsolete, so keep an eye out for that! Again, if your site is more than 12-18 months old, then there is a chance that you might be missing out on somethings that is affecting your customers experience, that you might well be unaware of. A classic case for this is not having a responsive site, or one that is optimised for mobile, both of which are crimes against your business in the current climate (definitely read those articles if this is news to you!)

Does Your Site Come Out Favourably In Relation To Current SEO Best Practices?

All search engines (but mostly we’re talking about Google here) are permanently evolving their algorithm to improve the results that they serve up to customers. If you’re site is still conforming to old standards, then you could well be losing traffic without knowing it. If you haven’t done anything to check on the basics of your site in the last 12 months and you are looking to get inbound leads from search engines, then its a good idea to check your site over. Some small and simple improvements could make a big difference there.

If you you’ve got any questions around site redesign and improvements, let us know! We want to answer your questions and will happily do an article on anything you ask for. Thanks for reading….