Remember the ABC series, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which ran from 2003 to 2012? For those who missed it, the series selected a family whose domicile was in desperate need of repair and unleashed a small army of construction crews and tradespeople to transform it into a showpiece.
Does your website reflect your brand?
When your business was just getting started, you may have hired a freelance web designer, or a friend or relative who did websites as a side gig. Or you sought the services of a small agency, but it was a few years ago. As your business grows, your brand evolves. Maybe you've added new service lines, product lines or departments. If you've gone from mom-and-pop to mid-sized business (or larger), your website needs to convey that.
The same applies to rebranding. Investing in a new brand identity needs to include your website, as well as your logo, uniforms, fleet vehicle wraps, packaging, marketing materials and advertising.
Your website looks out-of-date
Even if you initially invested in a top-of-the-line website, design elements become dated over time. As we'll soon discuss, other functional aspects suffer as the result of neglect. Whether your company is business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), your target audience can spot an outdated website - and will seriously question how up-to-date your enterprise is in all other aspects.
Even worse, it uses outdated technology
Aside from looking outdated in design terms and sending a bad branding message to your target audience, a website that's overdue for an update simply doesn't function well - which can be costing you lead conversions, in addition to posing a serious security risk (more about that later).
As Rinaldi points out, other issues can include a layout that isn't optimized for a modern-day browser, links to pages that no longer exist on your site and outdated offers. Outdated functionality results in a poor user experience (UX) that will increase bounce rates - or at least drive visitors from your website before becoming leads, most likely never to return.
Speaking of website security
Are you considering mobile visitors?
By now, it should be no secret that more people search the web using their mobile device than their desktop computer - assuming they even own one, or have one at their workplace. If your website looks great on a desktop but not on a smartphone, it is definitely time for a redesign. Nothing sends a visitor to your site to a competitor's site faster than seeing your desktop-optimized website page in miniature on their phone's screen. According to Google, are highly unlikely to return to a website that doesn't work well on mobile, with 40% moving on to visit a competitor's site.
When Google can't find your website, you suffer
A common issue for older websites - or those built by developers with little or no search engine optimization (SEO) expertise - is poor SEO. Complicating the matter is Google's own ever-changing inscrutable algorithms, which provide few clues about how the world's preeminent search engine ranks websites. Using outdated and/or "black hat" SEO techniques - such as keyword stuffing - can consign your site to the outland of SERPs, or result in Google banning it.
are likewise essential to SEO best practices. These are snippets of text that describe a page's content. The meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
The extreme take-home message
Remember our opening analogy? Whether you determine your website needs an extreme makeover or just some remodeling, you don't need a small army to do the job. Virtual Stacks Systems provides comprehensive services, ensuring that all components work together seamlessly and reliably to achieve your marketing goals. Learn about our , website redesign , social media marketing , and logo design services. There's a place for you at our conference room table! today.
