Do you find yourself providing a preemptive apology for your website when sending people there? Are you reluctant to show it to potential partners, customers, job seekers and media members? Are you embarrassed by it?
The website is the front door to an organization in today’s digital age, and it often provides an essential and enduring first impression for people engaging with your brand for the first time. Something that is so vital and impactful to your brand is simply too important to grow stale, out of date and ineffective. Waiting too long to update or redesign your site can prove to be a mistake with lasting consequences.
At Fryed Egg, we work with our clients to ensure that their websites serve their goals and needs and offer a representation of themselves that they can be proud of. Here are some possible signs your website is ready for a redesign.
Dysfunctional functionality
Your website’s functionality can provide the clearest evidence that it is time for a redesign. Visitors to your site might feel that age in a variety of ways. For instance, many of your visitors likely will be perusing your site on a phone or tablet. If your site is not optimized for mobile, however, their experience will suffer. Similarly, older sites can be hampered by slower load times that test the patience of visitors. Some older sites also might not offer an adequate space to properly feature the kind of fresh content, such as videos, blog posts and images, that is crucial to hosting a dynamic site.
Appearance matters
The look of your website often fades with time -- not literally, but the perception of it will change the longer that it remains the same. Eventually, it will feel stale to visitors and out of step with the newest web design trends. If you’re behind those trends, your site might not only look old but it could feel difficult to navigate to users who have come to embrace new design features they have found on other sites. And aesthetics matter if you want your site to feel fresh and current. To avoid feeling dated to your target audience, be sure to plan a website redesign before your site becomes over the hill. Try to look at your site through the lens of an outsider. Make a snap judgment. How do you feel about this organization based on their website?
Disappointing results
You should be tracking and keeping an eye on key metrics for your site. If you are not getting the results that you want, a past-its-prime site could be the cause. Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who enter and exit your site on the same page without any clicks to other pages on your site. If you have a high bounce rate, it means you have a lot of visitors who take a glance at your site and decide not to stick around. The cause could be a variety of shortcomings, but an outdated site is one common turn-off and an evident sign that your site is not providing an appealing place for visitors to engage with your organization.
Does your website still reflect who you are?
Your website needs to reflect who you are. If you have changed, then your website should change, too. Change can take on many forms. Perhaps your organization has grown, expanding to new geographies or offering more services or products. Or maybe your brand messaging and visuals have been revamped. It can be difficult to retrofit a site to integrate significant new components, and the results can seem disorganized and awkward. Sometimes, you simply need to start over with your site and design it in a way that better aligns with who you have become as an organization. Your site should provide a strong, accurate impression of who you really are.
At Fryed Egg, we help our clients create great website user experiences, while attracting visitors in droves with creative, carefully targeted campaigns. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.