|
5 Signs It's Time
To Redesign Your Website
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 anytime soon.
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 And, if you have to apologize for out-of-date information,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 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 consult us 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! |
|
Web
Redesign
