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How to Improve an Outdated Website
Posted On: March 17th, 2011

You’ve had a corporate website for a few years now, and you’ve noticed while surfing the Net that for some reason, your site just isn’t measuring up to other sites.  Your competitors’ sites are leaving your site in their dust.  Why is that? It probably means your website needs some improvements.

But there’s a problem: what if the budget isn’t there for a brand new website? Do you leave your lackluster site as is and let it do real damage to your corporate brand? Or do you hire a professional website developer to improve your outdated website, without reinventing the wheel?

You decide. And while you’re at it, here are some telltale signs that your website is in need of some professional help:

• Your website has more blinking graphics than meaningful content – if your visitors get dizzy looking at your site because of all the animated flags, scrolling banners and other moving things it’s time to rethink things.
• Your website actually doesn’t have any content; it consists entirely of graphics – let’s face it, if you want to get found in Google you need to use actual content in your web pages.  Saving 200 words within a graphic means that’s 200 possibly meaningful, keyword rich words that the search engines can’t see.  Your website will also be a nightmare to update – in order to change the smallest amount of text the graphic that includes that text must be reworked.
• Your website is still built in frames – If your site’s content is using a vertical scroll bar but the rest of the site is stationary than you are using frames, which have been considered unprofessional and out of style for quite a while now.
• Your website actually has a horizontal scroll – it’s one thing to scroll vertically on a website; it’s entirely something else when you actually have to scroll from left to right to read a sentence. If visitors need to scroll back and forth to see everything using a typical monitor, how bad it is for anyone with a mobile device trying to view your website? Face it, visitors will get annoyed and visitors have very little patience – they just click away (probably to your competitor’s site).
• Your website has spelling errors – if there’s one thing that will turn visitors off it’s a web page with spelling errors. Visitors expect your site to be professional. Period.
• Your website has no meaningful navigation – an intuitive navigation is one of the best ways to keep your visitors engaged and hopefully have them contact you.  Your website should have clear, consistent navigation that’s located in the same place on every page of your site. Make sure you have hotlink navigation so that visitors can get to the most important areas of your site including the contact page, home page and site map page. If you have a product heavy site including user friendly navigation is vital.
• Your website is missing vital information – make sure your website includes how to contact you, privacy information and an about section.  Even the smallest, one page site can include this information if it is organized well.
• Your website just has too much text - there’s a right way and a wrong way to say things on the Internet.  You can’t use 10,000 words to say something that can be effectively said in 1,000 words.  It will bore the heck out of your visitors.  They’ll probably click away.  Text on a website is meant to balance subheadings, graphics and other elements that make the experience of actually reading a page interesting.
• Your website design is uninspiring – it’s one thing to have a clean design but it’s another thing entirely to have an uninspiring design.  If your site is boring your visitors will probably assume your company and your products or services are boring too.  They’ll look for another site to inspire them.  A site that uses just the right amount of animation to spark ideas, or a site that doesn’t go overboard with text, or a site that uses a great balance of color, texture, words and graphics to convey just the right message.

Many of the issues addressed in this article can be effectively taken care of by a professional website developer who knows how to make a website work for you. Having your current site analyzed and updated may save you hundreds of dollars in development costs and countless hours of frustration. The bottom line is this: your corporate website is either working for your company or it’s not.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 1:26 pm and is filed under website development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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