Websites aren’t made to last forever. You might have designed with longevity in mind, but the life of websites is getting much shorter as technology and customer tastes advance. If you want your company to continue to grow, you’ll need to adapt. If your site has any of the following problems, you’ll want to consider implementing solutions as quickly as possible.
1 – Problem: Both employees and customers struggle with your website.
Solution: Look into using a CMS or web host that makes the user experience much easier. When your site is difficult to use, customers will abandon it and employees will quickly lose sales motivation and engagement.
2 – Problem: Your logo is too bland and boring to attract attention.
Solution: Hire someone to create a polished, professional logo that links to your homepage. The logo you use will represent your brand for the life of your company, so choose a design that’s distinct. Place it in a prominent location on your site to encourage positive branding.
3 – Problem: The navigation is difficult to follow, glitchy, or hidden.
Solution: Switch to a horizontal menu bar at the top of the site. This is where customers have come to expect the navigation of your website, and it tends to work best with the majority of website templates.
4 – Problem: Your colors do nothing to improve your branding efforts.
Solution: Use color strategically to reflect the message of your brand. Recognize that every color sends a certain message. Using a mostly neutral color palette will give your site an air of professionalism and elegance; for example, loud, contrasting colors speak of a modern and fun business. In addition, colors can be used to guide the eye. If you want consumers to see a call to action, for example, you’ll want to use a contrasting color against a neutral background.
5 – Problem: The site lacks quality imagery, which makes it more difficult for customers to process the purpose of your site.
Solution: Always invest in high quality, professional imagery. Without that, your site will look cheap and generic. Purchasing stock photos is great for blog content and graphics, but for home and landing pages it’s better to hire a photographer, so you have images relevant to your business. That way, your stock homepage photo doesn’t turn up on someone else’s homepage.
6 – Problem: There’s too much clutter on landing pages, making it difficult for customers to see your call to action.
Solution: Streamline your design with scrolling techniques, simple images, and clean lines. It’s easy for websites to become cluttered with animations, charts, images, and text, but homepages and landing pages are there to serve a purpose, and too much in the background can be distracting and prevent conversions.
7 – Problem: The fonts you chose are too difficult to read.
Solution: Stick to one or two simple fonts that are easy to read on any device or web browser. Using too many fonts is distracting and makes the content hard to read. When choosing a web-based font, sans-serif are traditionally easiest to read.
8 – Problem: The site isn’t responsive to mobile, isolating 80 percent of users.
Solution: Utilize responsive design, and fast. It’s not 2014, so if you’re dragging your feet about making your website responsive, now is the time to make the change.
9 – Problem: There are no social sharing buttons.
Solution: Place social media icons in a prominent place on your website, like in the header or on a sidebar. You need consumers to share your content and landing pages in order to further you audience reach and gain more customers. Customers will rarely take the extra step to copy and paste your content into their social platforms in order to share it, so make it easy on them.
10 – Problem: Your site’s content is outdated or irrelevant.
Solution: Begin updating your landing pages, homepage, and blog as quickly as possible. Employees, addresses, operating hours, and services can change rather quickly, and outdated content makes your company look cheap and sketchy. Use only the freshest of blog content and web copy in order to bring more loyal customers to your virtual door.
