If your website was designed and developed 3 or 4 years ago, there’s a very good chance that it needs a redesign by now. Standards, styles and technology on the web change has changed a great deal and continues to change at light speed. Even though your website might still be functioning well, you may be turning off potential clients unknowingly.

If your website was designed and developed 3 or 4 years ago, there’s a very good chance that it needs a redesign by now. Standards, styles and technology on the web change has changed a great deal and continues to change at light speed. Even though your website might still be functioning well, you may be turning off potential clients unknowingly. For a visitor that knows nothing about your business, your website is the entire representation of your company. If your website looks old, outdated or if it doesn’t work properly (in the latest browsers), that is exactly the impression that they will get about your company, products and services.

Here are 6 questions that you need to ask yourself, to see if your website needs a redesign right away.

1. Can you update content in your website?
Nowadays, if the content of your website is not updated often, you’re dead in the water. Websites are becoming more interactive and visitors expect to communicate with you. If your content is outdated and there’s no sign of life on your website, they will surely go elsewhere. If this is your case, you need a CMS (content management system), that will allow you to easily make changes to text and photos on your site and keep your website alive.

2. Is your website optimized for search engines?
If your website is not properly optimized, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to appear on search engines and reach thousands of potential customers. By upgrading, your new website can be equipped with the optimal, validated coding, smart navigational system and set of keywords, and page titles that could substantially improve your ranking in Google and other search engines.

3. How fast is your website?
Assuming that you’re investing a lot of time and money into marketing to get visitors to your website, don’t turn them away by having a website that takes forever to load. A study conducted by Akamai in 2006 found that if your website takes longer than four seconds to fully load, 33%, or one-third, of all visitors will abandon your site. If your website has a long fancy flash intro or is overloaded with photos, it’s time to redesign. Google have recently begun making suggestions that they will include website speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm. Now is the time to get your site running as fast as possible.

4. Does your website have outdated coding/programming?
Some of this outdated programming might affect the way your website displays or functions in newer browsers, which can damage your image… This will only get worse with time. You might also be missing out on use of new technology like video, RSS, etc.

5. Is your website still 800 pixels wide?
It’s quite obvious that a site was created a while ago if its width is 800 px.
Websites are designed to handle the ‘common case’ and ‘lowest common denominator’. Up until a few years ago that was a screen that was 832 px wide. That number has shifted upwards as most people have upgraded their screens to at least 17 inch LCD panels. The minimum these days is 1024px, and 1280 is more common. A redesign to a larger width will allow you to present more information, more cleanly.

6. Does your website look old?
just like with clothing, cars or hairstyles, styles do change rapidly online. If the graphics style of your website looks old, your company looks old and outdated. It is proven that visitors will navigate away from a website that appears outdated. If your competition has a newly design website, chances are that you’re losing business.

If you want to move forward into 2010 with a new look, contact us now to arrange a free site checkup after which we’ll get to work to make your site look and work its very best for the future.

It’s that time of the year again, and we have added new designs to our PF cards collection, so you can greet your clients in style!

Yes… It is that time of the year again. Just tell us the message that you would like to have on the inside of your card, send us your logo and we’ll have it ready within 24 hours (design only – printing takes 3 days).

We all know that positive impressions create higher perceived value, which leads to increased sales. But, what few know is the amount of time needed to make this impression. In today’s brand-saturated society, chances are you will only get a second or two of your customer’s time. Luckily, that’s all you need.
A study published in the Journal Behaviour and Information Technology shows that internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in a blink of an eye… to be more precise, just a 20th of a second! The study also shows that this first impression has a lasting impact, due to what psychologists refer to as the ‘halo effect’. If your customer likes the way your website looks, this positive effect will spread to other areas, such as your products and services.
“Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors”. Lead researcher, Dr. Lindgaard, warns.
The same rule should apply to print advertising, where it only takes a few milliseconds for customers to decide whether they want to continue to read your ad or focus their attention on something else.
So, perhaps image IS everything… at least for the first milliseconds.