When you’re not happy with your website, do you really know why? I talk to people regularly who are unhappy with their website, and often they can’t quite put their finger on why. We’ll discover why this is, and also what you can do to be more pragmatic about improving it. Seriously, who wants to invest money they don’t need to? No one I know.
Why it’s hard to identify what you need
The Visual Hook
I’ve seen people fall in love with totally ineffective websites because the home page image was beautiful. A website that is not necessarily a well designed sales engine, can still be appealing if the imagery is of great quality. Conversely, your website might actually be well designed on many levels, but if the imagery is of poor quality, it brings the whole website down. The good news in this case, is that you don’t need a new website, you just need some better visuals.
The Emotional Connection
When there is a change of manager, management or owner one of the first things that is altered within a business is the website. I have replaced perfectly good websites with very similar websites during a management shift, that has been nothing but a waste of time and money with very little improved outcome. Why is this? I’ve pondered this phenomenon a lot and come up with this key reason…
People have an emotional connection to their website. This is not the same with social media or other marketing collateral in my experience…there’s something special about websites. I think it’s because people see it as their flagship marketing statement from which all other things are born. There is a sense of wanting to put your own ‘stamp’ on it. It’s almost as if people see their business website as an extension of themselves and their place in the business. Perhaps I’m getting a little over the top here, but you get the idea.
So when you’re deciding to change or rebuild your website it’s important to be aware of this emotional connection. You need to try to analyse features and functionality more than the general feel of the website.
The Nitty-gritty Element
Sometimes it’s a simple little thing that gets under your skin that can make you dislike your whole website. It might be the font, the colour, the way the opt-in hits you, the way someone misspelled your name or any number of little elements that aren’t the way you’d like them.
A lot of these things could only require minor changes that don’t cost a lot. It’s worth identifying this so you can avoid rebuilding your whole website if possible. It could be, that if just a few of these minor elements were adjusted, the site would be something you were very happy with.
You Don’t Have a Content Updater
A number of businesses we work with have regular staff changeovers, or use volunteers to update their websites. When a new team comes on board, and they can see that the website content is out of date, often their first reaction is, “We need to rebuild the website because it is out of date.”
You may not necessarily need to rebuild your website. Rewriting your website with up to date content and some new visuals can be all your website needs to be fresh and useful again. This kind of update isn’t a small job either, but it sure beats having to build a whole new website again.
When to tweak your website
We’ve already talked about what can be upsetting to you about your existing website, and here’s a summary of the kinds of things that can be easily tweaked:
- new copyrighting
- new images
- add social media buttons
- add a blog
- new colours
- new logo
- updated slider
- new heading images
TIP: Identify the core purpose of your website to know if it’s working for you.
The Core Purpose
One of the biggest mistakes you can make on a website rebuild or refresh is not identifying its purpose in the first place. We talk about goal setting so much in marketing it’s almost boring, but we repeat it over and over because it really is key. So start here.
- What do you want to achieve with your website? Does your current website meet these objectives?
- What sort of functionality does it need to have within your overall marketing strategy? Does your current website have this core functionality?
When it’s time to cut it loose
Sometimes it really is a better idea to rebuild your website rather than try to update your current site. Here’s a few common reasons we come across:
Your WordPress theme is unsupported
I say WordPress because it’s the platform we most commonly use, but this advice applies to any platform. When you have a platform that is no longer supported, it’s only a matter of time before a WordPress update will cause things to break.
When they do break, these unsupported platforms will have no way of being fixed properly so best get out now while the going is good, and go for a WordPress theme that is likely to stand the test of time. This can never be guaranteed, however, there are some companies that have been around for a long time and stand a better chance of giving you the longevity you need. We always use themes that have brilliant support and have been around for a while.
The feel is out of date
This one is a little harder to put into words, but if you compare your website to any of the current themes on themeforest.net you’ll notice straight away what I’m talking about. If you have a very static site at the moment, you’ll see that this type of website isn’t being done much anymore. Go to some of the sites here for example, and you’ll see parallax effects and moving parts. There’s more video integration and one-page functionality. If you can’t see what I mean, then the chances are that your site is up to date.
It’s not mobile responsive
If your website is not mobile responsive, your current site can more than likely be built to be so. However, at this point it’s worth comparing the cost of making it mobile responsive with your current provider versus a rebuild. The difference in cost might not be much and you’ll probably have a better end result with the rebuild. This depends on a case-by-case comparison.
Summary
Identifying the true reasons that your website isn’t working for you is really what this all comes down to. Once you’ve listed what isn’t working and what you want to achieve, enlist some help from your website designer or a marketing consultant if you want someone a bit more impartial.
The important thing is not to rush out for a new rebuild without first seeing if something can be done to improve your existing website.
TIP: We offer free website reviews if you’d like us to look it over for you
