A New Website and a Fresh Start!

Launching a new website is always exciting! Creating an affordable website with a responsive design is usually something we do for clients, but today it’s great to be celebrating our own fresh looking site!

This may prompt you to ask whether your business’ website is due for a complete update, and also how frequently websites need to be updated.

If you’re looking at your website and wondering if it needs a new design – then the answer may be “YES.”

Your website is your face to the world. Most people thinking about doing business with your company will check out your website first. If it looks tired, cluttered and outdated, they may start checking out your competitors!

Ask Yourself These Questions:

1. How is your website laid out?
If you’ve been surfing around the web lately, you’ve probably noticed that most websites now have a horizontal layout, rather than the vertical format of the past. They are also clean and crisp, with information most likely to be relevant to visitors.

2. Does your site have a responsive design?
With more than half of all searches now being done on mobile devices (according to Google), it’s critical that you have a responsive website that displays well on smart phones and tablets.

In fact, if you don’t have a responsive site, Google will penalize you in mobile listings!  Google even has a tool you can use to test how mobile friendly your website is: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly.

3. Does it still feature flash?
Heaven’s forbid you still have a website with Adobe Flash! It does NOT mix well with ipads!

4. Are your social sharing buttons easily accessible?
Make sure your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. are in a prominent location on your website. Putting those sharing button icons in your website header, for example, will allow traffic to access your social media platforms from any page in your site!

5. Does your website reflect your business brand right now?

You should also consider whether your website is in line with your current business brand. We recently redid a website for a client – an electrician – who had started out doing primarily residential work. They had expanded into commercial/industrial work, and wanted to expand that area of their business.

However, their website was primarily focused on residential work, and, though customers remarked on its friendly look, it did not reflect the professionalism that contractors and others that hire electricians for commercial/industrial work would be seeking.

Today Little Sparkie Electric has a clean, easy to use site that reflects their commercial/industrial capabilities, but keeps just a bit of the charming whimsy of their past site.

6. Is your website intuitive and user-friendly
People are in a hurry, and they want to get a feeling for your company and your products and services right away. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, people stay 0-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer.

Their research found that “the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

“If the Web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the likelihood of leaving become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

“So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.” Their study concluded that to gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.

7. Is your contact Information easy to find?
Putting your contact information in the header or footer of your site makes it easy for viewers to call you as soon as they have questions or make the decision to meet with you.

8. Do you include a call to action?

Whether you’re selling products on your website or offer consulting services, do you ask them to take action? Click here – Call Us today – Sign up for our newsletter – let people know what you would like them to do!

If you’d like to talk with us about an affordable website with a responsive design, give us a call – 301-696-8886!

Wait a minute, you may say, you didn’t talk about search engine optimization (SEO)!  No, we didn’t, but watch for our next blog post about SEO!