Websites are a powerful tool that promotes you around the clock. With a website designed to keep your business up-to-date, you have a terrific marketing tool at your disposal. However, if your website is out of date, it has the potential to harm your business.
A fancy website design doesn’t mean you’re keeping up with the trends. The simple things on your site can give you a bad reputation and hurt your business. Daily, we come across sites that have outdated elements. All it takes is a few minutes to update these four elements, and you’ll be up-to-date and on-brand.
Outdated Website: UX/CX
Even though you might have built your website years ago, it is important to maintain it regularly. Check if your website contains code updated two or more years ago. Remember: Although a website contains code four to five years old, it should still be reviewed to remove or replace it. What this does is update the aesthetics and functionality of your pages.
In addition, a review should be made to remove or replace any old code if you notice that your site is not working correctly on mobile devices, or if the text or images are “floating” off of individual pages.
Form fields that are not positioned correctly on the screen may require updating, and links may no longer show on certain pages.
If your website has been built for a long time, you may need to take action in order to fix the issues listed above.
When the above issues occur on your website design, you will need a designated website designer to address these concerns.
List of Accomplishments
Are you updating your portfolio regularly?
When a potential client visits your website, does he still see the last project you completed 3 years ago?
Having a dynamic portfolio is important on many levels – it will boost your search engine rankings, provide fresh content for google, demonstrate a wide variety of skills on your website, match potential clients and their upcoming projects, establish you are an active business with a wide array of undertaking projects, and demonstrate that you are proud of your work.
Dates
If your website is more than a couple of years old, avoid publishing that information anywhere. Visitors will assume your website is stale, and so will search engines.
Make a point to review these dates every six or twelve months and correct them as needed. If these dates are critical, you can use a function like the PHP date() function or hire a website designer to fix these back-end concerns for you.
Office Hours
Are you a shopkeeper and have recently decided to change your opening hours? Perhaps you have decided to close early on Friday afternoons to focus some time on other tasks and wish to remove information about regular business hours.
The problem is that your contact page still notes the shop is open 9 AM to 6 PM. If customers decide to pop into your shop at 5 PM, they will be turned away by locked doors. Not good! You could have prevented potentially irritating a customer by changing your regular hours.
The solution to this doesn’t even require a website designer from Doncaster. Simply update your schedule on the back-end or place an announcement on the home page to inform customers of the change.
In Summary
Simply having a website online should not be enough to motivate business to come in. The website should always be on the webmaster’s mind, and the webmaster should always be updating the site with fresh content. It is strongly advised and good practice to regularly check in with your website and inspect all aspects to ensure you provide visitors with a good experience.
For an even stronger approach, get a website audit or have a marketing or web consultant go over your website for you, like those from Stephensons IT Support Solutions. We’re a group of web designers from Doncaster that delivers best-in-sector IT support and digital marketing services. Consult with our team today!