Continued from the first part of my article on the Reasons to update your website’s look and feel.
If your website is just falling a little bit flat, then you might benefit from a redesign. From the information contained herein, as well as the series of articles that will be coming over the following weeks, you can be an educated and savvy consumer in the process of redesigning a website.
5. Not Driving Organizational Goals
We already talked about not having goals, so we’ll assume that you have goals.
Are they the right goals?
Just picking a site at random, let’s take a quick look at Ford. They spend a good amount of their time in their main advertising area talking about non-ford-branded (Mercury, Lincoln, etc) hybrid cars. So, I know that I don’t watch as much TV as maybe some other folks, but, when did you last see an ad for the 2011 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid? You’ve probably seen about a dozen of Ford’s F150 commercials with Mike Rowe in the mean time, haven’t you.
The web is advertising, more and more every day. Ford’s website probably costs them in the neighborhood of $10M/yr to run (there are a lot of people go into a site like that), and they allocate roughly half of their mindshare on that page to products outside of what I would guess are their core performers (trucks and Ford cars).
Do you think that Ford spends half of it’s advertising budget on the MKZ Hybrid? Even on the 2011 focus (yes, I know the focus is huge in Europe, please do try to stay focused)?
No, probably not. So, why spend mindshare on the web on those products that don’t drive your core business goals?
6. Content is King
I’m hardly the first person to say that. I’m probably not even the first person to say that to you, this month.
Having up to date content on your site is key. Content, in so many cases, is your product, or, at least, your packaging. You wouldn’t buy a carton of eggs that had been left sitting on the shelf for a month, so why would you trust content that was loaded onto a website when the website was first setup years ago, and then never touched?
Hey, creating is quality site is hard work. You need well written, plentiful content that goes to your goals, speaks to your audience and is updated frequently. It’s a drag, but that’s why they call me, ich bin expert.
7. How many visitors do you lose while they wait around for your site?
Does your site take more than a second to load? One whole second is too long already.
Amazon has found that every additional tenth of a second(!) that users have to wait, the conversion rate drops by a full 1%. Amazon has the same users as you do (because they have way more users), and if they get frustrated when they’re going to amazon to buy something, how much patience will they have on your website where they’re probably either shopping, or being sold something.
Like it or not, we live in an instant gratification world. if your site can’t live up to it right now, call a pro.
8. Google doesn’t even know you exist
Google is smart, but it can’t read minds – yet.
You need to write your content in a way that you clearly communicate to google what is important, and what is not. You can do this through the subtle language of semantic markup, the far more subtle language of link balancing, or the comparatively blunt tool of robots.txt, but the one thing that is for certain is that you cannot do it with words that are in text, or content that is loaded in from an external source, be that flash or javascript.
Google, and similar services (bing, yahoo, etc) are increasingly the sources that people use to get their news and information. If Google doesn’t know about your site, then it can’t send traffic to your site. If Google isn’t sending traffic to your site, then you’ve got some pretty big problems.
9. Tough to Touch
Do you have a CMS?
Do you know what a CMS is?
If you don’t have a way to quickly, easily, and safely update the content to your website, then chances are that you don’t do it. If you don’t update your content, you’re likely falling prey to the reason #3 listed in part one of this article.
Having a website that is tough to update is like having plants that are hard to water. Put another way, making it difficult on yourself if the surest way to be confident that you won’t do it.
So, please, make it easy to update your content. Then, y’know, update your content. We’ll look more at specific CMSs later.
This article, as well as Part One of “Do I Have to Redesign My website should get you started on the process of at least figuring out what you need to do.
As it comes to actually doing the thing, you should wait for my articles coming up int eh next several weeks / months as your guided tour of how to (re)build a website.
Until next time.