Does my website need to be re-designed?

This is a question facing any business with a website. When is the best time to redesign the online face of the business? This, I believe, falls down to a number of things…

Does it look bad?

This is quite an obvious one. Does your website actually look bad? Assuming that you have browsed around the internet, and viewed other sites on the web, if you can notice quite a large difference in the visual quality and usability of other websites on the internet and yours, it may be time to have a re-design. The visual look of a website is the first thing which any visitor will notice when first landing on your homepage. Users can quite make their mind up about a business within a few seconds, and if the website does not grab their attention, they will quite rapidly exit and possibly move on to your competitors.

Your competitors

This leads me on to the next point. What are your competitors website’s like? Do they pose a substantial threat to your online generation of business? This also covers the point of visual design again. If you can trump your competition by a catchy up to date website, this could be very beneficial to your business.

Take a look at your competition. The easiest way to do this is to use a search engine to search for the area of business you fall into, and just have a browse around at the other results that pop up.

Search Engine Performance & Marketing

Older websites tended to be built in a way, which many would consider, to be search engine suicide. Websites are generally built in HTML code with the addition of CSS code for styling the website and many other types of languages for server scripting and interactive functionality such as PHP and JavaScript. A well constructed, website complete with all the necessary check points covered for full search engine visibility and performance, is an absolute must in the world today.

The big search engines, such as Google, Yahoo & Bing, will look at the quality of code in your website, whether it follows the web standards and whether your website is regularly updated

Older websites also tended to have ‘non-friendly’ URLs. This means that the address of your website and the internal pages are not ‘readable’. They usually look something like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/356?78hjduf/page?235-0.html

If you can’t read this, neither can the search engines to help determine the content of that page. They prefer website addresses to look like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/sub-category-name/page-name

The all important subject… cost

It’s true, a new website will cost you money. To avoid this some businesses take to the ‘Do it yourself’ method. The reason there are website designers and developers is because they understand how users browse websites, when to use a certain colour or typeface, and how to structure and build the website to reflect your business in the most beneficial way possible.

Many businesses are afraid or hesitant about contacting web design company’s, because of the potential cost of having a website re-built. The probable fact is that you may be doing more damage to your business’ vitality by not doing so.

A new, fresh, modern website, built with up to date standards and oozing with rich user experience could be the best thing you could do for your business in the present technological age. No matter what industry you are in, a percentage your potential client base will use the internet to search for your business, greet them with an up to date website.