Website Redesign – Do you need it?

There are dozens of reasons people provide when questioned as to why they do (or, gasp! do not) need their website redesigned. Here at ClickNathan, I simply love designing and redesigning sites, so I’m usually redoing this site at least once a year (but then, when you’re a web designer, you can afford to / can’t afford not to).

This page covers reasons to redesign your site. If you’re on the fence, you may want to read my Redesign vs. Realign article.

1. Your current website’s design is outdated.

This is the most common reason, and users know in an instant if a website is up to date or not, simply by the way that it looks. Websites with fuzzy or broken images, hard to read text and outdated layout are often skipped right over as surfers of the web often automatically assume that the website is years old and will have outdated content or nothing valuable at all to offer. Think about it in real-life terms. If you see a dilapidated building on the street, with its sign barely hanging on and boarded up windows, are you likely to even give it a second glance, let alone attempt to go inside?

ClickNathan Solution: Let’s dig in. See what you’ve got, what we can work with and what we need to bring into the 21st Century. I strive to create designs that look timeless, that help users realize what it is you offer, what you want them to do. Not just pretty, useful. My development approach is to use the best technology available today to keep your site lasting well beyond tomorrow.

2. People aren’t sticking around.

While a design can be up to date aesthetically, it may be lacking in functionality, and so users are getting confused when they first get to the site and subsequently are turned away. Note that functionality doesn’t mean “bells & whistles”. It means, you aren’t making it easy for them to figure out where they need to go next. Your site needs to immediately demonstrate its purpose. Internet users are impatient and don’t like to search around on pages for what they’re looking for, they want it presented clearly and concisely the moment they arrive. You should know what your users want, and you should direct them to that goal. If you’re selling fine china, don’t fill your home page with links to the history of the Chinese government just because it’s fun: focus your users on the task at hand and they’ll reward you with performing those tasks.

ClickNathan Solution: We’ll assess how people are coming to your site, what they think they’ll find when they get there, and how best to present it to them. The good news is, people are coming to your site, now lets keep them there.

3. Not enough traffic.

Of course, you may find yourself with a nice looking site, and it may even be functional, but you’re just not seeing any traffic. If your site has been around for awhile, a lack of traffic indicates that you’re not doing well with the search engines. This could be caused by the fact that your site wasn’t built correctly, or that you need to work on the content presented therein.

ClickNathan Solution: We can review your current site to see how it has been structured, discover any points of contention, and develop a plan to correct them. Additionally, we can review your site’s content, which is perhaps the most important aspect to good search placement. I believe that good search engine placement revolves around keeping your SEO simple: create great content and make sure your site’s code is optimized to help, not hinder. I can help with both.

4. Your company has grown.

This is one of the better reasons to redesign. Your company is growing, whether in your physical store locations or online, and you need to expand to accommodate this growth.

ClickNathan Solution: This is a crucial moment in your company’s future, and you may not know how far this growth will go. Firstly, I’d like to apologize for whomever built your site in the first place; there’s just no reason that a site shouldn’t be built to accommodate growth. That’s why I create sites that are easily extendable and easily expandable. We can study your recent growth patterns, your projected needs, and decide how to best go about taking your site from confining you to a particular box, to being the machine that defines what the box is.