Does Your Website Need A Facelift?

Back in 2000, you took your business online with the latest and most cutting edge ecommerce technologies. Now, almost a decade later, your website is still chugging along, but that once shiny layer of digital paint is beginning to peel. Standards, styles, and best practices change at lightning speed and although your website may still be functional, you may be losing potential customers without realising why?

Here's some questions you need to ask yourself:

How fast is your website? You’ve worked hard to get your visitors to show up at your front door – but they fall sleep with long load times. Numerous studies have been conducted and all of them have found the same result: Longer load times = less visitors = less business.

If your website takes longer than 4 seconds to fully load, 33%, or one-third, of all visitors will abandon your site. Amazon found that a 100ms increase in site load time resulted in a 1% decrease in sales, while Google found that an increase of 500ms on load time saw a drop in revenue by 20%. Whatever the number the key to rememeber is that your website needs to load, fast!
Try optimising your website by compressing images or aggregating and cleaning out your CSS, and removing old, unnecessary content to reduce HTTP requests. You can also try switching webhosts if loading issues persist.

Does your website lack consistency? Although it may not seem like it, consistency in major elements on all pages of your site is essential. Elements like navigation, fonts and colors, URL format, and editorial style needs to show consistency throughout your website as it demonstrates professionalism and attention to detail.

If your site is riddled with typos, mismatched font sizes and non-loading images, not only will it impact on your brand but it can also negatively affect your conversion rate. Sites like Google, eBay and Amazon have hundreds if not thousands of pages online at any given time, yet almost all of those pages have a similar feel, design, and editorial style. Browse through, compare and take notes and see if your website maintains a solid level of consistency in comparison to some of the bigger players.

Does your website scream sensory overload? Information overload will prevent you from presenting the most important information on your website while delivering a load of clutter your visitor will have to sift through. You’ll be surprised to discover how quickly a set of eyes can glaze over. Click here to see an example.

Does your website look datedl? Technologies aren’t the only thing that evolve at a break-neck pace online – styles do too. Whatever style was hot back in 2005 probably isn’t what’s hot right now.

Here’s how one web guru explains it: Just like hairstyles, websites date. What was all the rage a couple of years ago is now seen as passe… Sometimes this is down to design trends - like the 3D buttons and interfaces that were so popular a few years back when graphics tools made it easy to create bevel and emboss styles. Other times it's because the web is maturing and web designers develop a better understanding of what visitors want. For instance, Flash intro pages were all the rage until web designers realised that users didn't like them and wanted to get straight to the content. Flash introductions are the beehive hairdo of the web design world: dated, impractical and utterly pointless.

Does your website render perfectly? And by perfectly, we mean perfectly, in all browsers on all operating systems and on all platforms with no text overlapping and no extra scroll bars anywhere!
You do not want to degrade your customer’s user experience based on their choice of browser, regardless of if it’s Internet Explorer, Firefox on Mac, or Safari on iPhone. You don’t need to install every browser and operating system ever created to test out browser compatibility.

So, how's your website doing? If it needs a revamp, it's not as expensive as you might think. Whether it's a minor or major facelift, we're only a phone call or email away.

Call (01) 2101031 or email us now to find out more.

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