When is the time to update your website?

Pro­mot­ing your brand isn’t just about busi­ness cards, brochures and exhi­bi­tions. Your web­site is often the first place that poten­tial cus­tomers will go to under­stand more about your busi­ness. It’s impor­tant that this first impres­sion isn’t just last­ing, but also positive.

The web moves very quick­ly. It’s easy to get left behind with an old-fash­ioned look­ing inter­net pres­ence. Cus­tomers need to have easy access to rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and to con­tact you with the min­i­mum of fuss. No com­plaints does not mean no prob­lems. If a vis­i­tor is unim­pressed with your web­site, they won’t spend time telling you about it. They will be like­ly to lookup your com­peti­tor instead.

How can you tell that your site is due for a makeover? Here are some of the more com­mon rea­sons that show you it is time to update your website:

Age

It’s a gen­er­al­ly accept­ed rule of thumb to update your web­site design every 3 or so years, with design tweaks and updates at reg­u­lar points dur­ing this peri­od. As much as web­site design trends change, the frame­works on which they are built are also being con­stant­ly devel­oped, allow­ing for a clean­er, more effi­cient and more user-friend­ly expe­ri­ence for your web­site vis­i­tors. pur­ple­plan­et is approach­ing its 11th birth­day, and we’re on web­site num­ber five!

A good anal­o­gy would be with mobile phones: if Apple, Sam­sung or Sony did­n’t bring out a new phone mod­el on a reg­u­lar basis, do you think your cur­rent hand­set would still be as quick and styl­ish in three years’ time, or do you think soft­ware advance­ments and the intro­duc­tion of new tech­nol­o­gy will make your phone slow and incompatible?

Mobile

You’ve prob­a­bly heard of the phrase “respon­sive design”. A respon­sive web­site is flex­i­ble, allow­ing vis­i­tors to expe­ri­ence your web­site as you intend­ed, no mat­ter which device they use. The inter­net is accessed from an ever-grow­ing amount of hand­sets, tablets, watch­es and mon­i­tors, with screens small to large. Your web­site must account for as many of these even­tu­al­i­ties as pos­si­ble, allow­ing poten­tial cus­tomers to get the best expe­ri­ence of your dig­i­tal busi­ness, no mat­ter how they access it.

Size

Around 10 or so years ago, it was stan­dard to build web­sites that were 800 pix­els wide. The usu­al font size was about 12 pix­els. A web­site with these mea­sure­ments would fit nice­ly into a stan­dard desk­top brows­er and be per­fect­ly leg­i­ble. As mon­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy has vast­ly improved, and with the intro­duc­tion of such things as reti­na dis­plays, stan­dards has changed. A web­site with these fixed dimen­sions would now sit like an island in an ocean on any mod­ern screen. It’s anoth­er argu­ment for a respon­sive web­site, but it’s also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with much more space, allow­ing your con­tent to breathe and not be cluttered.

Speed

As inter­net speeds increase at an alarm­ing rate, your site needs to keep pace. There’s no point in your poten­tial cus­tomers hav­ing break­neck broad­band if your site still loads like it was 1996. In all like­li­hood, an ini­tial load time of more than 4 (yes, FOUR!) sec­onds will lose you a third of your vis­i­tors. Also good to bear in mind is that Google’s algo­rithms take load­ing times into con­sid­er­a­tion. If the load­ing time is slow it’s time to update your web­site. A quick-load­ing web­site is a high­er-ranked website.

SEO

Speed is just one fac­tor that is used for search results. It’s impor­tant to be found quick­ly and eas­i­ly by your cus­tomers, not all of whom will know about you when they open Google and begin their search. Opti­mis­ing your pages with key­words and focussed infor­ma­tion will help your site climb the results pages. The eas­i­er peo­ple can find you, the more chance they will vis­it your web­site, which can only serve to increase your leads and poten­tial busi­ness opportunities.

Graphics

It’s amaz­ing how many web­sites still use pre-built images, where text and CSS can achieve the same (and often bet­ter!) results. But­tons, ban­ners, call­outs, etc. can all be made using pure text, which is infi­nite­ly bet­ter for search engine opti­mi­sa­tion, and cre­ative use of bor­ders, back­ground colours, pat­terns, shad­ows and so on. This method is pre­ferred when it comes to dynam­i­cal­ly resiz­ing the web­site for small­er-screened devices. Styled text is also much lighter (i.e. quick­er load times) than images.

Flash

If your web­site has Flash ele­ments, or some kind of ani­mat­ed intro, then you’re already way over­due to update your web­site. Flash was pop­u­lar, and heav­i­ly used, 10–15 years ago. Most pop­u­lar web­sites now no longer use any form of Flash in their code. Mod­ern web­sites pre­fer the more flex­i­ble and for­ward-think­ing HTML5 for any kind of ani­ma­tion or for play­ing video files.

Content

It’s your con­tent, so you should be able to add to, edit and remove it as and when you choose, with­out pay­ing a web expert to do it for you. At pur­ple­plan­et, we pre­fer a CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) such as Word­Press, which allows sim­ple admin­is­tra­tion of con­tent, call­outs, menus and blogs, with­out the ongo­ing cost of an out­side resource every time. Keep­ing con­tent sep­a­rate from code also allows for any future redesign process to be much sim­pler, as the con­tent sim­ply pass­es through the designed tem­plates. If we cre­ate a new design, we build new tem­plates and all your exist­ing con­tent then dis­plays inside these.

Social

Your online brand isn’t lim­it­ed to your web­site. You will prob­a­bly already have a Twit­ter account, a Face­book page, LinkedIn, Pin­ter­est, Insta­gram or any one of many oth­er social media plat­forms. By shar­ing these on your web­site with your tar­get audi­ence, you’re offer­ing users a way to keep in touch with your updates, on their social media tool of choice. Every blog post, tweet, sta­tus update, shared image or com­ment you make is a step fur­ther in pro­mot­ing your brand, mak­ing your mes­sage a uni­fied one.

It’s time to stop con­sid­er­ing. You need a bud­get for this work, as hav­ing an out of date, stale, slow and often bro­ken web­site is not only a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty, but it’s prob­a­bly hurt­ing your busi­ness every sin­gle day. It may take a good chunk of your mar­ket­ing cap­i­tal to get the site up to cur­rent expec­ta­tions but, once there, it will be eas­i­er to stay at the edge, with­out the need for sim­i­lar expense in the near future.