In today’s competitive market, you may only have one chance to make a great first impression on prospects. Quite often, that first impression happens in the digital space. There’s no shortage of companies for individuals to do business with, and thanks to the internet, visitors can evaluate dozens of vendors and providers in just a few clicks.
That’s why it’s critical for your company to invest in building and maintaining a professional website.
If your website was built without regard to web design best practices, it may be driving prospective customers away — and even causing existing customers to consider working with competitors. But what makes a good website? Below are a few common signs it’s time to explore having a business website redesigned.
It’s Not Aligned With Your Brand
Your company’s brand plays a significant role in how customers and prospects perceive your business. For example, if you don’t have a uniform color scheme, legible fonts or images that align with your offerings, that can convey a sense of disorganization.
Although maintaining alignment across your digital presence might seem daunting, working with a web design firm can simplify the process. These firms follow industry trends and dynamics, enabling them to provide clear direction for a website redesign that incorporates website best practices, accurately represents your brand and drives results.
It Delivers a Poor User Experience
To have an effective business website, you must choose a design that is built with your visitors in mind. This can take a few forms:
- Uncluttered look: Many businesses are now embracing minimalist and simple layouts that provide businesses more control over the user experience. Less clutter makes it less likely that you’ll overwhelm the visitor.
- Effective use of color: Websites that provide a positive experience often use a limited color scheme. The 60-30-10 rule, as UX Planet explains, states that website colors should be combined in the proportion of 60%-30%-10%. The largest portion should be the dominant hue, a third of the proportion is for the secondary color, and 10% is reserved for accents.
- Intuitive UX: In addition to focusing on your site’s look and feel, it’s also important to invest in an effective user experience (UX). If a site visitor doesn’t find your site easy to use, they’ll likely leave immediately, which increases your bounce rate and hurts overall site performance.
- Searchable: You also should have an integrated site search so users can immediately find and jump to the information they need.
The Design Is Not Responsive
If your website is only viewable on desktop and laptop devices, you’re missing out on a significant audience. Most internet users today browse the web on tablets and smartphones, which is why business websites need to be responsive.
Responsive websites are built to adapt to the screen size of each individual visitor. For example, a layout with multiple columns on a desktop will collapse to display in a single vertical column on a mobile device, and navigation menus are collapsed into a tray that is hidden and can be opened by clicking on a special “hamburger” menu button. Truly responsive websites also work well on mobile devices held in the landscape orientation.
With a responsive web design, users will have a quality website experience regardless of whether they visit on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. And, since responsive websites are built to adapt to multiple device types, you can save on development and maintenance costs that you might incur by trying to maintain a separate mobile version of your website.
Your Website Isn’t up to Date
In addition to having an effective website design, you also must keep your website content updated to convey a professional image to visitors. If visitors come to your website and you have pages calling out blog posts from years ago or information that’s no longer relevant, they’ll likely move on to a competitor.
For your website to be effective, it must deliver value to visitors. If your content doesn’t answer their questions and showcase your business’s expertise, the site isn’t working to its potential.
When you are evaluating options for your website redesign, you should consider employing a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. Content management solutions allow business teams to edit and update content intuitively without having to worry about touching code.
WordPress and similar platforms enable businesses to manage their blog, online shop, video/photo galleries, landing pages and more, all within one solution. By consolidating web solutions instead of working across disparate systems, businesses often benefit from lower long-term maintenance costs.
Slow Page Load Times
Now that high-speed internet is the norm for many regions across the globe, the attention span of internet users is dropping because of the volume of information they’re consuming. If your website content has excessive load times, then it’s time to speak with a web design professional.
A key website management best practice is to leverage caching technologies. Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a temporary location. When visitors come to a website that has caching enabled, they experience faster load times because their browser doesn’t have to repeatedly download the same content across pages.
It’s also worth noting that page speed is a factor that Google uses in determining search rankings. In other words, having a slow-loading site can prevent you from landing higher in Google’s search engine results.
Your Website Doesn’t Align With Your Marketing Goals
To succeed in crowded markets, you must continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and adjust based on what the data indicate. By incorporating content marketing into your website, you can boost your search engine rankings, deliver additional value to prospects and customers, and increase sales.
Although content marketing is a vast topic that can be intimidating, HubSpot reports that 70% of marketers are investing in content and that blogs are one of the three primary forms of media used in content strategies today. When redesigning your website, your web development agency should be able to help you understand how to leverage content marketing to achieve your goals.
Taking Your Website Design to the Next Level
If you feel that now’s the time to have a website redesign, the team at Orpheus can help you understand your options, and take your business to the next level. Our experienced team of web developers, designers and marketing strategists will work to understand your goals and objectives, and develop an actionable strategy from there.
Orpheus is a full-service agency that offers website development, web hosting, mobile app development, digital marketing and graphic design services. Contact us to get started growing your business today.
