You have a small business that is doing fairly well. Everyone is busy. In the midst of the busyness, your website has fallen by the wayside as a priority. You cringe each time you look at your website and make a mental note about your intention to re-do it someday.
It has been some time now and that “someday” never came.
Until now.
While your business is booming, you realize that customers on your website are having a less-than-pleasant experience. That repulsive cringe of disgust you experience when looking at your site is the same experience shared by customers and would-be customers.
Who would want to do business with a company with such a lame, slow, outdated website? you ask.
|Do you know how well your site is performing? 
and find out.|
Ignoring the need to update your company’s website can have potentially devastating effects. Your website is the first experience many people have with your business. Your website is the reflection of your company. You want to make sure your website makes a solid first impression with Internet users who could turn into potential customers.
What to Consider When Re-Doing Your Website
Besides the obvious updates of colors, layout and overall appearance, you must also consider your new site’s functionality and the user experience. Proper search engine optimization should also be implemented on your new site.
Here are some specific elements to pay particular attention to when revamping your company’s website:
Website Design
Your revamped website has to have more creative design elements to stand out from the myriad of websites cluttering the Internet. To be noticed online, your website must be unique and yet be relevant and useful.
How do you get your website to stand out? Here are some 2017 website design trends worth implementing:
- Utilizing more geometric shapes and lines
- Use a creative style and font for your page headings (diverge from the traditional centered layout and serifs fonts)
- Use multi-tone gradient imagery (aka supra-imposing one image over another, faded out background image)
- More use of GIFs and animations (tastefully – don’t take us back to the 90s)
- Mobile friendliness (make sure that your new website has a mobile responsive design, meaning that your website will be easy to see and navigate on both a large computer screen and a small screen of a cellphone)
- More hand-drawn elements
User Experience
Your website can look flashy with bright colors, illustrations, video and animations, but if a viewer can’t easily find their way around your site and find what they are looking for, they will quickly leave and go to another that is easier to navigate.
Web users know what they are looking for and they don’t have the patience to spend unnecessary time looking for it. They also like clear directions and guidance. When navigating your site, users want to clearly be told what to do. This is why it is important to have one, clear call to action on a page.
Website visitors quickly get confused when they get to a site and instantly get bombarded with a plethora of buttons telling them to do something. Spare your website visitors unnecessary frustration and stress and don’t go button crazy.
Besides having a single call to action on each page, make it easy for your site visitors to find what they’re looking for by having a prominent search bar function at the top of each webpage as well as a link to the site map at the bottom.
When visitors aren’t overwhelmed by the multiple calls to actions and can quickly search and find what they’re looking for, the more time they will spend on your site and the more likely they will return in the future.
Content
In recent years, content has become an increasing element of web design. Information is immediately at our fingertips online, and when users search for something, they want relevant, immediate answers.
With web users being in the driver’s seat, search engines have made user experience the top priority. For your website to be noticed, it is not enough to have a unique creatively designed website. You must prove to search engines, and more importantly, to Internet users that your business is a trusted and authoritative source of information.
You accomplish this through professional, engaging, useful content.
Understand your audience and their needs. What are they looking for and how will your company website answer their questions or solve their problems?
Quality content will make your company stand out as a leader in your respected industry which, in turn, will facilitate trust. Once users come to trust your brand through the content on your website, the more likely they will take the desired call to action and even spread your company’s brand across the web by recommending it to friends and family.
SEO: Putting it All Together
While all the previous web design elements will greatly improve your business’s online presence, your site won’t meet its true online potential without proper, regular search engine optimization (SEO). Web design, user experience and content all are aspects that contribute to full optimization. Modern SEO goes much further than including keywords in title tags and alt attributes, and these website design elements can have a major impact on your rankings.
In today’s digital age, a company can’t afford to not be online, let alone have an outdated, slow, poorly designed website.
A little self-promotion: if your company is planning a website re-design or has recently revamped your company’s website and needs help optimizing it, contact us today and make sure the redesign goes as smoothly as possible.
Find out how your website redesign impacts the rest of your online marketing efforts:
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