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 If your content is outdated and there’s no sign of life on your website, they will surely go elsewhere.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.

There are many reasons why is important to change the design of your website often, but the 2 most important reasons are ‘image’ and ‘functionality’. Since your website is the online image of your company, an outdated website could cause your visitors to perceive your company as outdated as well. Since browsers, HTML code and other factors related to web development change on a regular basis, a website that has not been updated in more than 3 years could experience usability problems.

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