Nowadays the importance of having a dominant online presence is something which simply cannot be undervalued. An effective and impressive website is the backbone of any online influence. Moreover, your business’ website defines and fine-tunes who you are as a company; your image and your reputation.
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The internet is a technology which is ever-changing and so you need to change with it in order to be successful. A website which was highly effective in 2008 is not going to have the same impact as it did then now. If you fail to redesign your website on a regular basis then you will lose out to your competitors and in a sense, you will become unproductive and ineffective.
The problem that a lot of people have is that they do not know when the best time for them to partake in a bit of website redesign is. First and foremost, you should never leave your website the same for a period of over two years. Most people recommend that you redesign your website every 12 to 18 months. After all, there is no way a web design of two years ago will have the same impact now.
Aside from sticking to the two-year rule, there are other telling signs which will indicate to you as to whether the redesign of your website would be a good option. Are you ranking high up on the search engine result pages, such as Google? If the answer to this question is no, then you should consider website redesign. The reason for this is that it means you are not using SEO, otherwise known as search engine optimization, effectively. SEO is the method used in order to increase your website’s visibility through moving it up the rankings. The different strategies used are ever-changing and thus your SEO campaign needs to be constantly updated. For instance, the keywords you are using may not be as relevant to your website now as other ones are.
In addition to this, if your website is entirely flash based then it is highly recommended that you consider a redesign. Nevertheless, it is important to place emphasis on the word ‘entirely’ – having certain areas of your website which uses flash is encouraged. The problem is when the whole website is based on flash. The reason this is problematic is that search engines only view flash as a mere file. This means you cannot optimize all of the solo pages on your website – providing different titles, keywords, descriptions etc. This could see you miss out on a massive potential customer base.
Furthermore, if you do not have trust signals on your website, this is a big problem. Trust signals range from security badges to contact information. If you are a one-man band and you don’t want to include your contact number and email, you really need to look into customer contact services to handle your calls for you. Most web users today do not trust websites that do not feature comprehensive contact information.
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And finally, another indication that you need to invest in website redesign is a high bounce rate. For those who are unaware, a bounce rate is when someone visits your website however they leave on the same page as they entered on. In general, this can indicate that your website wasn’t engaging enough to make the individual want to explore further.