How often should you redesign your website?

How often should you redesign your website?

Short answer: Every 2-3 years.

Ready for a little more detail? Let’s review three important reasons to not let your website get stale.

Ensure your site matches your marketing strategy.

Your website is one of your most visible marketing communication tools. As such, it’s critical that its message matches your sales presentations. Keeping a site current is about more than just updating a few pages to make sure all products and services are listed. It’s about reflecting your corporate image and having a consistent voice with your offline sales and marketing activities.

It’s also about your audience. Over time, websites have a tendency to become cluttered and unorganized. The best laid plans can fall flat with one too many updates. And the most organized menu structure can become messy when trying to squeeze in too many pages to an outdated site architecture. Look at your site analytics. Are your users getting where they need to go? Is your key information easy to find? If not, it’s time for a redesign.

Empower your website with an inbound marketing plan. 

Digital marketing is shifting and content is taking on even greater importance. Is your website optimized to take advantage? If you’re ready to launch an inbound marketing campaign, you’ll need to take a good look at your website first. In many cases a site architecture overhaul is in order and most pages need editing to flow and better communicate your calls to action. This is another case where the website redesign might be less about changing the brand design and more about changing the content within that brand framework.

Enable your site to function wherever, whenever.

A website design project may not be about the look of your site – it might need to be all about the functionality. Have you checked your stats to see how people are accessing your website? We’re finding clients with 50% of their audience coming from a mobile device but their website isn’t fully responsive. Responsive design is a driving force for many site redesign projects.

The most common reason for redesigning websites: to update the design

The three reasons we’ve outlined above are good things to consider and evaluate as part of your overall website strategy. However, let’s not overlook the actual design elements of your site. Design trends have changed more over the past three years than in the decade prior. And design elements that were trendy and cutting edge a few years ago, are now somewhat stale and overused. More font options, better CSS animation, more design functionality… Simply put, once two-three years go by we can do a LOT more with the look and feel of your website.

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• Inbound marketing: what is it and how can it help? 
• How inbound marketing can improve your customer interactions