Let’s face it, eventually our marvellous website will look unprofessional, outdated and obsolete. The World Wide Web is a rapidly changing environment and even if we have allocated a significant amount of money and time for our website, we will eventually need to overhaul it. Without constant improvement, we will have a website that work against our business instead of for our business. Business owners should take a honest look at their websites and check whether a huge overhaul is overdue.
- Our websites is still heavily-based on graphics: This is among the biggest issues and we might think that using many pictures will make our website looks appealing. Although images can be indexed by various image search platforms, such as Google Images, our focus should be on text. More visitors go to website through text search, instead of image search. Some of the image-based websites can be intricately designed that they are almost impossible to change in-house. Even the simplest changes may require designers to re-create the whole layout. If this happens to our website, we should consider implementing new layout and try to go easy on images. This will allow search engine bots to better see our content and the page will be loaded much faster.
- No change in information: Many business websites have information that is the same with five years ago. This won’t provide an incentive for consumers to visit our website again. If people have visited our website, it is unlikely that they will re-read our website. If there’s nothing new with our website, there’s no reason for people to return. If it seems to be difficult to add new content to our website, we should consider using new platform. In this case, we may need to use new content for our website that can really encourage people to return. Once the new platform has been installed, we need to update the website with various interesting content. We should give readers a reason to return to our website and they should be able to take notice of things that we can offer to them.
- The website is all about us: Our website could use a wrong basic idea and there’s nothing in our website that’s about our readers. People will eventually get tired reading a website if everything they read is about the business owner and there’s nothing valuable for them. If we continue to provide claims about how great our service and how well our products are developed, then we are missing the point. When people visit our website, they may initially don’t care about our products or our company. They only want to get solutions to their problems. By offering methods and tricks that can be helpful to readers, they could also become interested to our products.
- The website looks amateurish: Many professionally-made websites that were created 8 years ago seem to look amateurish by today’s standards. They may use graphics with subdued colors and other boring elements. Although many visitors don’t have a clue about website design, they could sense that a website looks outdated and amateurish. They may see that some of the modern design elements are missing.
