We have clients that come to us wanting to re-design their websites. The main reason they give is that their sites “don’t work”. What does that mean?

No marketing?
Sometimes the website is just fine. It’s designed well and it works well. But no marketing efforts have been made to drive traffic to it. A site like this one does not need a re-design. What needs to be determined is how to market it. Don’t blame the site. A site with no marketing plan is just like a physical store with no marketing plan. The only ones aware of it are the owners and its neighbors.

Outdated look and feel?
Web design trends change just like fashion. Visitors get more and more savvy and can tell what looks like an outdated site and what looks modern. If the design looks outdated, visitors will get the idea that the content is outdated also. A website needs to keep up with the trends to appear professional and up-to-date.

Re-Branding?
If anything significant has changed about your business, update your website. There’s nothing worse than making the visitor doubt if they are in the right place. Maybe your visual identity has remained unchanged but the nature of your business has changed… then make sure the content gets updated.

Old technology?
Technology seems to change every second. We are not suggesting you re-design your site that often! But there are significant changes that impact how well a site works or how fast it loads that should trigger a re-design. Does your site still use tables instead of CSS? Does your site have an animated intro? Does your site use old, inefficient code? The end user may not see these issues, but they will experience them when comparing your site to the competitors.

Growth?
Maybe your site is fine for a small site, but now you need to add more features that were never in the plan. This is a great opportunity to re-think the entire site. Most of the time–when making significant additions and upgrades–it’s more efficient and cost-effective to re-do the whole thing rather than fix things here and there.

It truly does not work.
Broken links. Typos and grammatical errors. Never-ending scrolling pages. Error messages. Sometimes saying that a site “doesn’t work”  means just that. See this as an opportunity to plan, develop, and market, and maintain a much better site that you ever had.