1. Logo or marketing materials have changed.
If your logo or marketing materials have changed your website needs to change with them to maintain continuity. That includes color schemes, fonts, images, and content.
2. New audience.
Did you create a product for people in their 20s only to find out that it appealed more to those in their 50s? You need to redesign to accommodate that new audience. They have a different aesthetic and you need to cater to them.
3. Design is outdated – doesn’t reflect company well anymore.
If you look at Apple’s site design over the past 10 years it hasn’t changed much at all. However, Microsoft’s has. Apple’s design was lasting. It was clean – and still is. Microsoft’s site had dated features and used dated color schemes and layouts, they’ve updated their site nearly every year during the past 10.
4. Site not search engine friendly.
Search engines change the way they search sites regularly as they learn how people search and how relevant people find their search results. If your site doesn’t keep up with those changes you may not only be not being found in search listings but more importantly you may be doing something search engines find illegal and may get your site banned from them.
5. New products or services.
Every great business learns from its customers and in doing so provides them with what they want be it a new product or service or an improvement to an existing product or service. When that new product, service, or enhancement is ready to debut you need to update your Web site to showcase it. Outline its features, its benefits, and tell people why they need what you have.
6. Company branches into different areas.
Take a look at any large company, most started small, with a singular focus and over time they expanded their selections. Target now offers full groceries including fresh fruits and vegetables and frozen foods. And when they introduced these new products they updated their site accordingly to introduce their clients to their new service areas. A crucial aspect in customer service.
7. Adding e-commerce or other major features.
Most clients who have a brick-and-mortar business and who have a Web site developed ultimately desire an e-commerce complement for their site, be it booking appointments online and providing a deposit, selling actual products, services, or warranties, and so forth. In doing so their original design may no longer achieve the Web site’s purpose, which likely went from Providing Information to Selling Products. In which case everything needs to be updated, navigation, content, images, code, and more.
8. Site is not easily navigated.
As a Web site grows, so does its navigation. Eventually that navigation becomes unwieldy and difficult to … well, navigate. The best way to redesign your navigation is to first install some sort of analytics on your site if you haven’t already (Google offers a great free product), and see where people are going at your site. Which pages are they visiting? Which pages are they leaving on? And reorganize based on those results … and keep reorganizing based on those analytics.
9. Your site loads slowly or is done in 1990s Flash.
If your page content doesn’t load within 3-8 seconds you’ve likely lost your visitor. Think about sites that you go to, how long does it take for those pages to load? Your site should do the same. If it doesn’t there are many ways to optimize it including: compacting your code, using includes, resizing your images, separating your layout from your content (using a CSS only design), and many more options.
10. Your website doesn’t get results.
If the purpose of your Web site is to sell your products and you aren’t selling your products then you need to redesign. If the purpose of your Web site is to provide information and your customer service call center is being inundated with calls about things that customers should be finding on your site – you need to redesign.
As you can see there are many reasons to redesign, and it’s very likely your site – like mine – could use a little tweaking.
