When To Re-design Your Website

One of the reasons for the cutthroat competition in the cyber world is the exponential increase in the number of websites that are dedicated to every imaginable niche. With thousands of other establishments just waiting to steal your business, there is very little room for error in your most effective and visual marketing tool – your website.

Business worth thousands can be lost if your website is still stuck in the dinosaur age, so here is a look at how you can determine the answer to the crucial question, should I re-design my site?

How to know when it’s time to redesign your website?

Your site is just a showpiece: The introduction of social networking sites have changed the way in which net goers interact with their colleagues as well as the establishments that they intend to do business with. If your site offers no scope for interaction, your visitors will soon tire of the one-way communication and seek respite elsewhere.

Incorporating a blog on your site is a wonderful way to keep in touch with your customers as well as to get real time feedback on your site and products. If you don’t already feature a blog on your site, you should seriously consider a redesign or at the very least use a free blog host.

• Your homepage disturbs visitors: If your home page is full of pop up ads, graphics, banner ads on both sides , text with a link in every second word etc; it may all be too much for a casual visitor to the site and a redesign may be in order.  It is crucial to remember that simplicity can pay off big in the cyber world.
• Your site is unreadable: This may be due to the content that offers little value to your visitors or simply because the designing team went overboard choosing the colors of the font and the background. Either way, you will need to remedy the situation at once.
• Your site has an unusual navigation system: There is some amount of comfort in the known; to put it simply, people are happy when they are faced with the prospect of using something or being in a situation that they are well aware of.

  If you spring an unusual navigation system in their face such as a horizontal navigation bar instead of a horizontal one, your visitors may leave out of sheer frustration, so if you have any such design elements change them immediately.

• The site is incompatible with some browsers: If your site works well in IE but bombs in Firefox or Chrome, you can be sure that people who use these browsers are not going to take the trouble of downloading IE just because they want to visit your site; it would be simpler to take their business elsewhere.
• The site has only text or no text at all: If your site focuses only on content you will be robbing your visitors of entertainment value; however, if there is no content people will not want to stick around for long to see the graphics; so it is essential to find middle ground.

How to know when your site is outdated?

• The traffic to your site is limited at best: Although, you think that your site looks spectacular; it simply does not seem to attract visitors and even when a few people do trickle in; they quickly move on; these strongly point to the possibility of your site being outdated. It is obvious that your clients fail to see an element of appeal in your website.
• The people who do show up don’t buy from your site: There are two possibilities here; either the traffic is not relevant or even if t is, people still don’t want to buy from you.

  If your site receives a number of visitors who are simply not interested in what you are selling or the information that you are offering; this can be attributed to the use of faulty keywords. However, of the traffic is relevant yet not interested in your offerings; this is indicative of a technical issue with the site such as a navigational problem that should be addressed at the earliest.

• Your content is a few years old: Content was and is still the king; the veracity of your content will often have a bearing on the clients’ decision to buy from you.

  After all, when people are shopping online, they rely heavily on your words and if these words don’t live up to their expectations, you can certainly not expect them to be interested in your products

• There is no clear call to action: Your clients visit the homepage, they like what they see but then things go downhill because although they want to buy from you, they don’t know where to go next.

It is important that the site have a clear call to action; you should give your visitors a clear idea about where they should go next; whether you are selling products or are building a list; the conversion page should be easily available.

A poorly made and maintained website can has the same impact on your sales figures and customers as a dirty brick and mortar establishment with obvious chaos all around, so it’s important to act fast.