So… why do I need a website?
Can you think of a couple of reasons why you shouldn’t? It wouldn’t be a balanced argument if you don’t.
Companies spend millions creating brochures and distributing them. By having a website you can skip that entirely. Your potential customers can find out about you and any of your products online. If you get most of your business through networking and personal connections, then they will want to check out your website.
More than 2.4 billion people use the internet every day, and some 90% of those have purchased something, or contacted a company, online in the last 12 months. So by not having a website, you will be missing out on a big piece of the pie.
Have you tried getting a business loan recently? It’s not easy, but if you try and the bank manager asks to see your website, you better have a pretty good one. It doesn’t just stop with the bank, the perceived value of your business will be lower in everyone’s eyes – especially your customers.
By having a website potentially thousands of people are going to see it. You are able to influence people’s decisions and educate them.
You know that great feeling you get when people recognize your work? Well, by having a website you can show off what you do and take pride in your work.
That’s right! When it comes to writing the content for your website you are going to revisit things about your business that you haven’t in years. You will most likely reassess your business goals.
Ever wanted to start a business? Well, now you can do it with virtual space.
Your website runs 24/7 without any supervision or need to lock it up. You can always be there for your customers.
By having a blog or even just a feed on your website, you can update customers on your newest offers, products, promotions, events, photos, or any other content.
The internet has opened up a whole new world of marketing that didn’t exist before. Your website can attract new business by using a whole host of low cost marketing techniques.
You can greatly reduce the cost of customer support by have a ticketing system, or even just an FAQ on your website. I can think of about 5 companies off the top of my head that streamline your customer service straight from your website.
I know there are other ways to do this, but by having a website you can have your own email address@whateveryouwant.com. It is more professional and easier to remember. I know you love your steveman934@gmail.com , but it doesn’t really resonate with customers.
I know that sounds a bit far out, but it is true. You can run really cheap press releases online about your business, but to do it you will require a website. In fact, I have had clients who were absolute nobodies get one hundred thousand views on YouTube because of online press releases.
The best answer to “Why do I need a website?” would be that you can stick it to the man. It is the easiest way to quit your job and earn a living.
Do you love sports? How about ballet, alternative dance, photography, holidays, Kit-Kats, cars, skateboards, science or animals? Well, then you have a business idea just waiting to happen. The internet has room for an unlimited number of niche blogs that can attract traffic and revenue. Just pick something you love and start writing about it.
On a little side note, if you own a website you get to call yourself a ‘web master’. Pretty cool! But reason #16 for ‘why I need a website’ is that you can easily make new business and personal connections with other website owners. This can lead to extra streams of income for you!
Have you ever been in an argument with someone and said “Well, I have written an article about that on my website, and actually, that isn’t the case.” It feels great! For some reason people don’t want to argue with you if you’ve written about something on your website. It also gives you a place where you can voice your opinion without judgment. If someone leaves you a comment you don’t like you can just drag it over to the spam folder.
You don’t need permission from your boss or company lawyer. Ash Ambridge drops the ‘F-Bomb’ all the time because she can, and no else is asking her to stop. Now she has a world class business with thousands of customers.
Have you ever wanted to get into business, but don’t know how to compete with all the big names out there? By creating an incredibly beautiful website with a solid strategy behind it you can smash the big guys to pieces. You have no chance of building bigger skyscrapers, but your website can break down the perceived wall between you and them.
Have you ever had difficulty making that sale? Or convincing someone that you are the real deal. By having a well structured website you can foster instant credibility with anyone. You can provide the ultimate proof that you are, in fact, the realest of all deals (couldn’t resist that phrase).
I bet you didn’t see this one coming. I have been harping on about how a website can help your business, but it can help you personally too. Not only can a website host your resume or CV, but by owning and managing your website you have demonstrated tons of hard and soft skills. Having worked in HR once upon a time, I know it is valuable.
When people visit your site, they see it as a reflection of your organisation. If your site looks professional and is loaded with useful information readers will see you as an authority and expert. Likewise if the site looks poorly designed and structured and/or out-of-date they’ll make the same assumptions about your company. The website should highlight your product and/or service and the layout should look harmonious and consistent.
Has your content got dates on it – blog posts, events and similar? It makes sense to remove or update out of date content. As websites mature and grow, it often becomes apparent that certain parts just aren’t working well anymore and are becoming outdated. An obvious example of this is the use of flash.
The USA is now a smartphone society. We’re spending two hours online on our smartphones every day; twice as long as laptops and PCs. If you factor that fact with Google’s April 21st mobile-friendly update ignoring the mobile market is a very risky business. It is now considered common practice to make a website mobile friendly (responsive design).
Responsive Web Design is a collection of techniques that allow a website to flex and adapt to the size of screen it’s being viewed on. Someone opening your site on a small smartphone could be shown the same site as the person opening it on their laptop etc.For many businesses it may even make sense to design your website “mobile first“.
“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.” – Jeffrey Veen
In conclusion, if you haven’t updated your website in a while the chances are that you may be driving mobile users and potential customers away. Find information on our responsive on mobile website design.
Is your website browser compatible? Is your source code valid (HTML and CSS)? Does your website meet the basic web standards? Is the technique and/or (version) programming language outdated?
An important factor you should consider is the increase of usability in web design. Every year web standards change radically and techniques to build web sites become more advanced in order to comply with the latest standards. If your site was developed several years ago, it probably has a lot of unnecessary HTML code, and may be slowing down your website loads speeds – which may in turn impact your ranking in the Google search results.
Including modern techniques such as CSS coding will allow your web pages to adapt on all smartphone devices.
When building your website, it is important to only select components that will positively impact the objectives of the website. One aspect of a website where this is especially true is photography. Too many dated website designs have an over reliance on stock photos. There are a range of arguments on why not to use stock imagery covered in the blog by Grant Epstein, including:
Do the use of images on your website accurately reflect the business message you are trying to present?
Many dated websites lack effective calls to actions that convert users to customers. A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link that you place on your website to drive prospective customers to become leads by completing an action on your landing page. Is your USP and call to actions highlighted clearly on every landing page? As important, are they interesting enough to persuade your visitor to complete the desired action?
You’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your website. An old website may not be equipped with the necessary tools that will help you measure how effective your online presence is. Examples of this include heat mapping, conversion tracking & user recordings. Nowadays, there are an assortment of online tools you can invest in to help you measure what works and what doesn’t on your website, right down to the minutest detail. However, in order to use those, you will need a modern website.
The first impression of your website would obviously be the overall layout, but a reader is visiting your website because they are looking for useful information. A site redesign can also give you the opportunity to re-address how you communicate with all your visitors and to write copy that is simple, on target and more effective – remember, in the modern “go faster and faster” world you only have 2 -4 seconds to engage new visitors.
The content of a website should be considered to be the most important thing, as it helps in determining how effective a website is. Fresh and unique website content is an very important factor in encouraging people to revisit your site more often.
Just like a website your digital marketing and SEO could be in need of refresh. If you don’t update your website it’s sure to fall down in the search engine rankings. Search engines regard websites with the most recent content as the most relevant to web users. Your content might be gold but if it’s the same content as it was 5 years ago then search engines crawlers might not think it is as relevant anymore.
The redesign also gives you a chance to rethink your keyword targeting and the overall conversion rate of your website. The way people search and how they search has changed dramatically over the last few years, even truer with the explosion of smartphone devices now in use.
When we talk about user experience (UX), we are referring to the totality of visitors’ experience with your site—more than just how it looks, UX includes how easy your site is to use, how fast it is, how easy it is to find information and how little friction there is when visitors try to complete whatever action it is they’re trying to complete. You website navigation should focus on nudging the right visitor toward the must-have experience.
The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive on your site and leave without visiting a second page. A high bounce rate is an obvious sign of an outdated or poorly performing site. Website users usually leave a site hurriedly without visiting other pages simply because they don’t find what they are looking for instantly or do not like the look of it!
Are your visitors just leaving as soon as they land on your site? How does your website compare to estimated industry standards? (Stats from Kissmetric)
You can monitor bounce rate on your website through Google Analytics. Either as a website whole or on a page by page basis. Look at bounce rate in the following areas:
Location – If your company is a local business serving USA, you should expect a high bounce rate from outside of California. If you are a local business, definitely segment your traffic to understand how traffic is performing within your local area and avoid it being skewed by irrelevant visits.
Device – A desktop user, tablet user and a mobile user often have different intent. For example, we expect more people to bounce on a mobile device than a desktop/tablet user, because mobile users are often looking for specific info like an answer to a question versus casually browsing or shopping.
New vs Returning – A returning visitor has different intent than does a new visitor. It is common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with your brand. You should segment your traffic to optimize individually for new visitors and returning visitors.
Medium – People coming to your site from the many possible mediums such as website referral, email, social, direct, organic, paid, display, offline, pr, and etc have different expectations set and will often have substantially different bounce rates.
If an alarming amount of users bouncing you may need to rethink your website, SEO and digital marketing strategy.
Your website’s loading time is a major factor in people either staying or leaving the site and never returning. Kissmetrics published a great infographic on the subject. We recommend you use a tool like YSlow, Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom and find out how long your site takes to load. If your score is not up to par, then you need to rethink your website.
You’ll be able to update your website yourself. An up-to-date website based on a content management system such as WordPress makes it easy to administer, avoids any messy code, you simply write in what you want in an organized fashion (WYSIWYG editor). That way, you can personally add to or switch your content based on your specific goals, while constantly optimizing your website. The Web design industry is constantly working to improve itself. This includes keeping layout designs fresh, updating blogs, refreshing imagery and pushing out timely promotions and advertisements.
Stories of websites and social media feeds getting hacked are becoming more and more frequent. Security flaws can rear their ugly heads on any website, new or old, but the likelihood of security flaws affecting an older website is much greater as it relies on older technology.
For the vast majority of businesses, integrated websites are essential in delivering the requisite service levels. Your customers will expect access to a blog, contact form, support form and if applicable, shopping functionality, all on one easy to use website. They will require a single login and rapid access to accurate and timely information at all times. Integrating your site with your back-office order fulfillment, tracking, billing and CRM systems such as Sage, MS Dynamics or Salesforce reduces the likelihood of mistakes and confusion. Many small businesses start out using a collection of open source tools for different activities, only to be forced to use a complex, error-prone and time-consuming strategy involving manually copying information from one system to another.
A website refresh is the perfect time to find ways to save admin time and improve customer service.
In summary, the above information highlights the most important and most common signs to look out for when you want to know if your site is becoming “old hat”. Although there may be other signals that you need a website update, there should be enough here to guide you on the right path.
If you would like advice on your current website please feel free to contact your local experts at Super Pro Sites, Inc.
Do you love your website?
If the answer is no, you shouldn’t even continue reading this article. Just go ahead, choose a new beautiful theme and build a website that will make you proud. A site that will promote your work and help you book more clients. Otherwise, what’s the point in keeping this powerful marketing tool, investing time and effort into it, if it doesn’t help your business grow and flourish?
Long gone are the days when it was sufficient to just own a website. Users are way more savvy and picky these days, with all the information available, and so many brands and businesses competing for their attention. Hence, it’s imperative that you maintain and keep your website updated with design trends, technology advancements and search engine algorithms (if you care about SEO).
So, if you’re not sure whether your current website needs a facelift, consider these 10 criteria or reasons (listed in no particular order) of why your website may need a revamp asap:
This one should be straightforward. Your website promotes you 24/7 in the online world. If you’ve rebranded recently, if your photography style and aesthetics have changed and evolved throughout the past seasons – your website should reflect and advocate that change. Otherwise, you may be attracting the wrong type of clients, that are after your old type of work. Which brings us to reason #2.
We’re explaining this in more details in How Design Affects Your Business Growth article, but the point is – if you are not getting inquiries from the type of clients you want to work with, you are not positioning yourself correctly on the market. One golden rule is to curate your work. Check the content and galleries you show on your website, remove the type of work you don’t want to do in the future (i.e. family, portrait, editorial, etc). Carefully select your best, fresh images (the type of projects you want to do more) and include them on your homepage, in your main slider. This will immediately filter out the inquiries which are not a good fit for you. Make sure all your content is consistent, including colors, fonts, icons, etc.
This one affects your visitors’ experience on your website. “Old school is cool” does not apply when it comes to functionality. The Internet and digital world is constantly changing and evolving. Web standards shift each year, dictating new tools and technologies for building a good website. Your potential clients’ preferences and tastes shift even faster. What was trendy yesterday, may not be tomorrow. If you want to get ahead of competition, stand out and be memorable, you need to be agile with your approach and website.
Therefore, if you’ve built your website over 2 years ago, most likely it’s far behind in terms of looks and functionality. It probably has outdated code that can slow down its loading speed or they way it responds on different devices (if it’s mobile friendly at all). It might also not be compatible with some of the latest popular browsers. And technology wise, I promise you since 2-3 years ago, most website and theme providers have significantly improved their platforms and offer better tools for you to build and manage your website. Just like we did with our new framework and backend experience.
Bottom line here – start looking for website design inspiration and a fresh design.
Aim for a loading time under 5 seconds. Poor results could mean you have some work to do. Slow loading could be caused for a number of reasons: heavy unoptimized images, underpowered hosting and even an old, poorly performing website.
This is extremely important. If you’ve been pouring your heart and time into SEO and a marketing strategy, bringing a lot of traffic to your website, but the second they access your homepage (or any other page), they bounce right off of it – you have a problem. You’re losing leads and potential clients. A high bounce rate indicates that you’re doing something wrong, either with content, with the navigation or overall look and feel on your website. On average, a bounce rate between 40-60% is considered to be OK (this varies depending on your industry).
You can check your bounce rate, by checking Google Analytics. Login and go to Acquisition >> Overview tab. If it doesn’t help, it’s time for a website redesign, and we do suggest seeking some expert advice in UX and UI.
If you want to dive deeper into Measuring Performance and Tracking Success for your site contact Super Pro Sites, Inc.
To be honest, new or old, any website can be hacked. The experience is stressful and painful, especially when you lose information, or/and have to build everything from scratch. However, older websites rely on older technology, therefore chances of security breach are higher. Make sure your website is updated.
Firstly, let’s start with the basics. Do you have a blog? You should, as it’s a powerful marketing tool to drive more traffic and users your way, through keywords (assuming that you invest into a proper SEO and keyword strategy), internal links and back links. Secondly, know that search engines love fresh content. Every time you make an update to your site, Google and other search engines crawl and index your pages, thus your site ranking gets recalculated. If you keep your content updated, you increase your chances of getting noticed. Pair that with a brand new, kickass website, and you’re guaranteed more attention, social shares and inquiries.
If we got you curious about SEO, please contact Super Pro Sites, Inc.
Of course you do. And it’s not just a button added here and there. It has to be placed strategically, exactly when you’ve managed to get your user’s attention and curiosity for more. We’re explaining How Call to Actions work in Designs, but the idea is to guide your site visitors through your content to your Best Work gallery, then the contact form. If you’re current website is limited in CTAs (Call to Actions) and doesn’t allow much customization – it’s time to get something more flexible and powerful for your sales funnel and business growth. For example, take a look at all the buttons, quick links, CTAs (let’s stay connected, subscribe to newsletter, etc) spread out across the homepage of Porto. It just feels natural to click through, explore more galleries and latest posts, right?
An old outdated website might not keep up with all the new apps, plugins and integrations available out there. So, if you want your favorite Studio Management System, Photo Editing app or any other useful tools that simplify your workflow to be integrated with your site – keep it updated and fresh.
I sure hope this is not the case, but if you still don’t have a mobile friendly website – get a new theme NOW! Even if you do have a responsive or adaptive design, you still need to keep up with the latest trends. Newer themes include modern css code which allows your site to adapt nicely to any device. They also allow you to hide certain page blocks for mobile, for a faster loading speed and nicer user experience.
With Super Pro Sites, Inc, (some of our newest themes: Kyoto, Crowd, etc) you can also choose how your images look in a slideshow on mobile, so it doesn’t get cropped weirdly due to a smaller screen display. You’ll be surprised how many possibilities have come to life since your last website revamp.
The point of this article was not to convince you to update your website just for the sake of changing. While a website redesign is an important and demanding process, which requires some time and effort – think about the reason you got a website in the first place. It exists to promote your work, help customers get to know you as a brand and creative personality, as well as get them excited to work with you!
We put much thought and expertise into each of our products, to create beautiful and powerful tools to help you build a website worthy of your work and vision. Be that themes, custom website designs, plugins, setups or SEO services – we want you to succeed! And we are here to help and guide you through the process. Give us a call or send us an email and we’ll help you get the most out of your website and branding.
Your website is the face of your business, and you don’t want the fine lines and wrinkles of age to detract from its effectiveness. Mobility should be at the top of the “must do” list for the upcoming year. In the beginning, mobile designs were somewhat limiting, but today’s mobile technology provides support for voice search, natural language processing, geolocation, and more. Mobile functionality will drive many of 2018s website trends.
Security
Have you noticed more site addresses begin with https:// rather than http://? The “s” stands for secure. Visitors want to know they can trust your site. Your customers want to know they can make safe purchases from your website. No individual or business wants to risk having their computer hacked and their files held for ransom. This issue matters to Google as well so they will be influencing how users see your website. 2018 is the year you want everyone to know they can expect secure transactions on your site. SLL stands for secure sockets layer, and it is standard security technology, which allows an encrypted link to be established between the browser and a web server. SLL certificates are issued to websites that take this step to ensure that customer data passed between the browser and web server remains secure. Consumers are learning to look for SLL certificates, and you need to have one. Stay tuned for more offers from Ridpath Creative regarding HTTPS and your website.
Lead-Generating Forms
Forms generate leads that are valuable. When a website visitor completes a form, it demonstrates an interest in your services or products. Some of the most successful forms offer a free white paper or other incentives to encourage newsletter sign-ups. Lead-generation is essential for business-to-business (B2B) sites and in this age of technology, your website can be the best tool in your arsenal.
High-Quality Images
Expect to see high-quality images and graphs on business websites in 2018. Your website must always look its best, and you should have a professional photographer shoot images of your business and employees. You can also find professional images at online stock photography companies. Do you need a custom graphic or photograph? Contract Ridpath Creative to help.
Micro-Interactions
Inviting website visitors to participate by offering them micro-interaction choices is a wise choice. By offering the visitor the opportunity to like your pages and offerings on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites with a simple button click, you are opening the door to thousands of new visitors. Micro-interactions are proving to break down barriers and increase the speed of spreading your message. This concept works great with mobile connectivity and will be making appearances on the most progressive websites.
Play Your Cards
Card layouts are user friendly and inspired by the social “collection” site, Pinterest. Rectangular or square blocks transport the user to an identified purpose of the website. The trend is catching on rapidly because it presents every website in an easy to use format, and it works for every type of business. Wholesale, manufacturer, travel, restaurant, retail, automotive, blog, and entertainment sites all benefit from the card format. This attractive and user-friendly style is sure to become the most popular new theme for 2018.
Bring your website into 2018 with updates that excite the visitors to your site and generate sales and leads. When you accommodate your consumers with greater mobility, security, convenience, and opportunities for interaction, your business will grow, and conversions will increase. Contact Super Pro Sites, Inc today to help with your strategy and implementation.
A content management system (CMS) enables you to maintain the content on your website without any additional software our technical skill. When using a CMS, you can add new pages, upload images and be in full control of your site – all you need is a web browser and an internet connection. Find out more about the Content Management Systems we use.
Yes we provide all our clients with training on maintaining their website via the CMS.
Yes, we can! We work with talented and experienced copywriters to help you get your message across simply and directly. Our copywriters can even write content that can help your site be found via Google. This is an additional service and different rates apply.
Yes, we sure can. Our skilled designers are not only brilliant at producing great looking websites, but they can design a unique logo for your business too.
