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1. Your Business Has Changed or Grown
If your business is no longer the same as it was when
you designed your site, chances are you should
redesign your website to reflect that. If you've only had
a few small changes, you might be able to just update
your current website. But, if you've changed your
business direction, decided to provide new products
or services, or if your company has grown significantly,
it will pay off to redesign your site. Reconsider how the
changes to your business should be reflected or
addressed in the structure, design and strategy
behind your website.
2. Your Site Looks Like It Was Designed in
1995
Some signs of an outdated web site include: chunky,
slow-loading graphics, old-style "framed" coding,
where the site is divided up into panes that load
separately, little animated cartoon clip-art throughout
the site, and text created as images instead of in
HTML. Having any of these on your site could reflect
poorly on your business, making you look 'behind the
times'. It can also make you look like you don't care
enough about your business or about technological
advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping your
company's website looking modern will improve its
credibility.
3. The Information on Your Site Isn't User-
Friendly
If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you
regularly get questions about your site text from
visitors, restructuring 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.
4. You Apologize for the Site When Referencing It
or
Handing Out Your Business Cards
Your site should be a source of pride. It should
provide 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have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken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.
5. 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.
6. It's Not Bringing in inquiries and Helping You to
Make Sales
If your site was designed long ago, there's a good
chance that it was designed as "brochure-ware". 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 auto-responder 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 a lot of 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
improve your business, look at the other sites that you
visit and note the functions they perform.
7. 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 Narrow Gate
Media 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
recoding your site using Edit On Site
could allow you
to do so. Having the ability to make changes and
update your own text will let you make revisions
quickly, with no additional expense. And you can play
with your site and make revisions to see what will
work best for your business and clients.
Summary
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!
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