We are often asked when is the right time to redesign your website. Our guest blogger and digital marketing expert, Kristen Sousa provides her opinion on this question.
The other day, I had a meeting with one of my website clients to wrap up a few loose ends and ensure everything was in good shape for the big website launch in a few weeks' time. Once we had settled on a date for going live, I took the opportunity to ask the client when might be a good opportunity for us to sit down and start talking about their next site. Of course, this was said in jest but I wanted to illustrate a point. The site in question has been in production for the past six months and, by all accounts, it has gone really well. However, there is no denying that this has been a mammoth task for our client.
Since they last updated their website over three years ago, there have been significant changes and achievements in their business that never actually made it to the website. Subsequently, there was an entire suite of information that needed to be produced in order to ensure that their new site accurately reflected the business they are today. To give you an idea of scale for their undertaking, this required:
- Countless internal meetings to gather information
- Briefing our digital marketing team on these new and or changed business requirements, so that they could carry out the appropriate keyword research
- Writing pages and pages and pages of content, in a search-engine friendly manner (with the help of the keyword research carried out by our digital marketing team), to fill in the content gaps
- Commissioning, editing and approving creative (photography, artwork, video) to support aforementioned content
- Getting approval on all of the above from key stakeholders and, once received, adding said information to their new site
... phew!
While our client has done a sterling job in pulling all of this information together, it is really important that they don't fall in the same trap. Take a minute to consider this.
How different could their business look today if, instead of leaving their last website largely untouched they had continued to invest in keeping it up-to-date?
How many times did a prospective or even existing customer need a service provided by my client's business yet not know that this was something my client could provide? What was the cost of this? It almost doesn't bear thinking about.
A few years ago, I came across the following diagram (Credit: WiderFunnel)
The gaps on the traditional web design model illustrate quite clearly how much opportunity you could be missing out on! Ouch!
So, when should you redesign your website?
The key thing to know is that I am not suggesting you run out and redesign your website.
If your site isn't mobile friendly or has an architecture/site structure in place that can no longer hold the information you need it to, then fair enough it probably is time to redesign and develop your site. Even if that isn't the case, the reality is your current site is likely to have an established audience. If every time they visit your site and it is out of date, you could be missing out on an opportunity to sell your products/services.
My advice? Go through every page of your website, identify what is missing or no longer valid and update your site accordingly. Make sure you regularly set time aside to do this. Once you are happy that all of the information you would like to have on your website is on it, start looking at what you can do to optimise the experience of visitors to your website in order to increase what you get out of it.
Do you have a web project you would like to get off the ground or a website that isn't meeting your expectations? Get in touch.