Everyone needs a website redesign from time to time. By this, I mean a complete redesign from the ground up and not just a cosmetic makeover. Below I have listed 5 reasons that your company website may need rebuilding, and I highly recommend it if any of the following are true about your current website:
1. It has no Content Management System (CMS) - Is your website just a bunch of loose documents sitting in a directory? Are you wasting hours and hours using an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or – as I actually saw the other day – Microsoft Frontpage (which was discontinued in 2007)? Doing it old-school may have a certain geek-cachet, but seriously, you're digging yourself into an ever-larger hole, and there are much better things you could be doing with your time.
2. It has a proprietary content management system belonging to your website host - Oh dear. So you probably need to go back to them every time you want anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Have you noticed that as time goes on, their service gets slower, more expensive, or both? Do you feel like an irritant? They probably designed their system with the aim of taking over the world with it, but in reality they've got half a dozen clients, and really wish they'd never got into this commitment. Oh, and to make matters worse, you can't move the site to another web host, which makes you dependent on them.
3. It's confusing, structurally - The website is more like a corporate brochure, focusing on your company rather than the customer. It's been built around the idea of listing the company's products rather than prospects' requirements, and in no way does its primary job, which is to say to the visitor: "Here's what you want to do, here's how we can do it for you, and here's how to take things further".
4. It's got no proper Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - The website might have been built without SEO in mind, which could mean the pages have bad (or no) titles, bad (or no) descriptions, and bad (or no) properly tagged headlines. When your pages do turn up in Google, do they have a nice neat heading and a nice neat two-line description underneath, all written by you? Or do both parts of the result look like random snippets of text from the page.
5. It's got no blog, no easily-updated news section and doesn't publish new content to services like email subscription, RSS feeds and Twitter - Automatically pushing your new content out to customers who actually want to hear from you should be a no-brainer, right? Incredibly, in 2011, many businesses add new pages to their websites, sometimes about important new products, and then fail to send this information to their prospects and customers. Do you really think people come round to your website to see if there's anything new?