As a web designer, it’s crazy that we’ve had the same site for years without an over-haul. We’ve always gotten compliments on it, so we’ve just been revising and adding to it as it is. Finally, enough is enough.
What is wrong with the old site
Sure in 2005, this was the state of the art in website design, but now it’s totally dated. Notice how it looks so small on the page. Back in 2005 designers were focused on a set standard size of 800 X 600 to fit laptops. The content scrolled in boxes if needed. Today, monitors are larger and the trend of limiting the length of a web page is over. The site looks plopped into the middle of the page and way too small.
On the homepage, there is very little text (originally there was no text). Search engines have little content here to index. Back in 2005, Flash sites were big. I didn’t build the site as just one animation as some did, but this old site relies way too much on Flash. Again, search engines will not be able to index a site properly is it’s just built in Flash. It may look fancy, but you won’t get too much traffic if your site is Flash.
One of the most important sections is the portfolio section. On the old site, that’s a nifty Flash animation that slides the samples through as you click around. If that wasn’t bad enough for search engine optimization (SEO), the detail of each project were contained in pop-up windows. Not only is that annoying to clients, they may have pop-ups blocked, and search engines won’t want to follow those links and index the site.
- In general, the site provides no call to action. It doesn’t make the visitor want contact us unless they are really wowed by the portfolio.
- The site had a bad structure for SEO purposes. Pop-ups and Flash animation is killing our SEO.
- The site looked small.
- The site was built in tables which is a totally outdated way of building a website. Today, designer use cascading style sheets (CSS) which give us greater control and options.
- The old site is way too beige.
How is the new site better?
It’s new…New is better in a website. Old websites are outdated, not classics. This is a fresh new look that our existing customers will notice right away. We brought in the blue, but kept the site consistent with our marketing. We have the same colors, images, and logo as the old site…except less beige.
This homepage has actual content on it. We built the site for SEO. There are keywords as titles, links, heading, and text. We’ll keep tweaking this to keep it up to date, but this structure is better for updating purposes.
This page is meant to speak directly to our customer’s needs. If you’re looking for a designer, you have a project you need designed. We tried to as simply as possible, say that we have the capability and skill you are looking for.
The call to action here it to contact us. The phone number is huge and up top. The contact for is an easy way to contact us as well. Some visitors will prefer to email right from the website. We tried to provide as many options for contact us as we could.
The portfolio section is fixed. We built it in straight HTML and CSS. It’s not as slick as the old section, but it will function much better. It’s easy to navigate for the visitors and the search engine robots. Due to the fact that we’re redoing the whole site, we used more recent works in our portfolio.
It’s good to rehab your marketing just so that you take a fresh look at what you are doing. The old site was working fine in some respects and it wasn’t urgent to “fix” it. Sometimes, you have to say “If it’s not broke, break it.”
Now I can move on to work that I actually get paid for.
