The landscape of the business marketplace is growing ever-more dynamic, and as consumers respond to the large-scale transition of products and services to cyberspace, the look, feel and content of your website is becoming your primary means of customer engagement. Advertising has been pretty much usurped by social media, PPC and search engine optimization. Out of all your other methods of promotion, these are probably what you should pay the most attention to in your website design.
The Importance of Fresh Content
You should update your website regularly; and the time varies depending on what type of website you have. If your blog is the primary means of traffic, then keep in mind that every few days, your consumers expect updates and new additions – perhaps twice a week – to ensure that you are still connected to their needs.
Alternatively, if your site website design incorporates social networks heavily, then the expected updates tend to be more frequent. Just think of how often, for example, people log on to Facebook to check their message stream; some of the more vigorously-engaged companies update their website every few days.
As for website design, which entails an almost complete overhaul of your website template, you should consider doing this once every few years. This goes back to the dynamism of the web; as better programming scripts become available, HTML gets updated, JavaScript becomes more powerful and other web design-related technologies manifest, you run the risk of having an outdated design that underperforms relative to industry competitors. This, of course, means you eventually lose visitors. It’s important to realize that, first and foremost, humans are visual creatures, and you have to first attract traffic with website design, before you have a chance to draw it in with the strength of your content. It’s simply a fact of human nature that the most attractive door gets opened first.
Website Design for Longevity
Updating the visual appeal of your website to keep pace with growing technology isn’t just a visual thing; as time wears on and your company adds or takes away elements from its core set of tenets, the design you started with may no longer accurately reflect what your company stands for. Much like an office that has been occupied for several years, things need to be re-arranged to reflect changes in philosophy.
Functionality is also a crucial reason for updating your website periodically. As technology progresses, your site will almost certainly load more slowly than competitors who’ve chosen to update. You can lose a percentage of visitors if graphics and text take too long to appear on the screen; especially as the bandwidth on your servers becomes used up. Patience, as they say, is a virtue that not many people have – with so much else to do in the day, they’ll leave and check out another company offering similar products and services.
The good thing about website design is that a complete overhaul of your system is rarely necessary. With so many professional templates available today, it can amount to just a few steps to speed up your load times, tweak your code and make it more graphically appealing. The options exist for complex changes and small ones; it depends completely on your vision.