Benefits of a website redesign to your business
Lots of organisations now have an online presence but seldom do that much after it is launched. They do not realise the benefits of re-designing the website – particularly if the site is more than two years old. Older sites were generally not designed to be responsive on different platforms and if you don’t continually refresh your site, you won’t be up to date with the latest methods to get a good ranking on Google.
Stay up to date with the latest web standards:
Web standards have changed quite a bit in the last 2 – 3 years. In terms of accessibility, the increased use of HTML5 now allows you to have readable text over images or graphic elements that you have on your website. The old method of keeping search engines happy by using banners which have text as part of the image file will now go against you with Google as they cannot read text that is embedded in banners, graphics, etc.
Mobile Friendly:
Mobile phone visitors now account for up to 60% of search traffic that comes through to websites. A mobile friendly website is now essential and is weighted more favourably with Google than sites that are not responsive.
Update your website yourself:
Writing and adding new relevant content to your website on an ongoing basis is now essential for improving and maintaining your position in the search engines. With a wordpress content management system (CMS) our clients can add articles to their website on a regular basis. It must be relevant and engaging content if you want to be at the top of your desired keywords and it must be written in your words and not a direct copy from another website.
The other benefit of CMS is less reliance on your web designer for updating content on your site. You have the freedom to remove, change and add to your own website and this is particularly useful if you have special offers or need to update the prices on the products/services listed on your website.
Quicker loading:
With the introduction of HTML5 and a cleaner, less cluttered approach to websites a new site will load a lot quicker. If your site has lots of images, sections of your site can be removed on the mobile version as slow mobile data areas still exist and people have less patience for a website that loads slowly. Nowadays if your old site takes 5-10 seconds to load the homepage people will go back and look for a quicker loading competitor. The speed your site loads is also now a ranking factor with search engines.
Utilise the latest marketing methods in your website:
The marketing and user experience recommendations have changed dramatically over the last 2 – 3 years. We have found that newly designed websites that get to the point and have a call to action point/s on the first loading screen perform better than those who have taken the traditional route of a slideshow, lots of text, advertising banners, etc. As noted before, due to the updates in Google ranking rules the approaches which were beneficial a few years ago will go against you now.
Finally, your competition may have started to overtake you in terms of what is offered or the design of their website compared to yours. If you would like to get your website back on track Web Design Belfast, BCS Web Design based in Castlereagh Street, Belfast would be happy to help you with a FREE website review. Click out start a project form to get in touch.