Is Your Website Out of Date?

Good News! Here are some tips to see if your website is out of date.

Looks Out Dated

The Site looks out of date if it still uses old html code, the website’s width is narrow, and the text is small and hard to read. Perhaps content is out of date, like coupons and offers. May favorite is Christmas Specials in May. Better yet Christmas Specials from 2 yrs ago. I admit it is hard to stay on top of seasonal or monthly specials, especially if you are busy running a business but it needs to be current.

Not Mobile Friendly

How does the site look on your smart phone or tablet? There are several remedies to choose from. Responsive design is a more affordable solution that uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)  to create a single version of the website that automatically adjusts to display properly on all devices; desktop, laptop, tablet, and smart phone.

Website or Pictures Load Slowly

If the website or images take a long time (more than a few seconds) to load then it could mean the coding is outdated or at least not optimized to current standards.

Copyright on Bottom of Page is more than a year old

I have been guilty of this one. If the copyright on the bottom of the page is more than a year old it needs to be updated. If it doesn’t have one – it needs one.

No phone number and is it smart phone friendly

Smart phone has the capability to dial a number but simply clicking on it. However, if the site is not designed properly it will not work.

Runs on Flash

Flash is over — it doesn’t work on most mobile devices, or if it runs at all it’s probably still unusable. Flash sites are also not accessible to users with disabilities since there’s no real content in Flash. For that matter, you’re probably not getting any search engine traffic since your Flash site can’t be properly crawled. Get rid of Flash.

There’s a welcome message

No need to welcome people to your site. Most of them know what a website is and will spend only a few seconds looking for what they want. Give up this valuable real estate to some SEO- and user-friendly content.

Is the logo on your site consistent with the rest of your marketing collateral and branded materials?

Consistency is essential to projecting an image of professionalism and competency.  Your website should always reflect your current branding.

Does the majority of the text on your site appear as images instead of HTML?

Image-based text is very time- and technology-intensive to update, meaning anytime you want to update your site you must devote time and financial resources to it. Even worse, images (as opposed to HTML) are a barrier to the all-important Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Any kind of graphic that is animated (flag waving etc.) or text scrolling across the page. 

Is there really any news that is so important that it has to ticker tape parade across your screen? If it’s that important, place it in your slideshow on your site – if it’s the absolute latest news feed, just place the feed somewhere on the page statically but use a title to indicate it’s the LATEST very exciting news. Otherwise that thing chug chug chugging across the page is really distracting (not to mention hard to read) when people are trying to figure out where they want to go first.

Easy for users to nav­i­gate?

Your site should be orga­nized in a man­ner that makes it sim­ple for a vis­i­tor to find the infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for very quickly. Clear, user-friendly nav­i­ga­tion is an expec­ta­tion — not a bonus. Ideally, a user should be able to get to all your impor­tant pages within 1 to 2 clicks. If that’s not the case with your site, it’s prob­a­bly time to upgrade.

Are there a lot of images that con­tain text on your site, such as but­tons or head­lines?

Search engines like Google can’t read text con­tained within graph­ics, so key­words or impor­tant phrases appear­ing on top of pho­tos, or as fancy graph­ics, aren’t indexed by search engines. Even more prob­lem­atic, text con­verted to graph­ics requires spe­cial soft­ware and extra steps to mod­ify. With the recent devel­op­ment of web  fonts, it’s now pos­si­ble to achieve through search-engine friendly code what could only be done by sta­tic graph­ics a few years ago. Whenever pos­si­ble, your web pages should ren­der as much text as pos­si­ble in search­able, styl­ized html code. Time and effort spent now will pay off in eas­ier main­te­nance and bet­ter rank­ings later.

Is your site achiev­ing good search-engine place­ment?

Old sites tend to suf­fer when it comes to search engine rank­ings. Bad or out­dated code, lack of fre­quent con­tent updates, con­tent that’s invis­i­ble to search-engines, or secu­rity issues are just a few of the pos­si­ble prob­lems that cause sites to suf­fer with search engine place­ment. If your site isn’t achiev­ing, it’s prob­a­bly time to make some upgrades, or even rebuild your site.

Is your site easy for any­one to update?

Now more than ever on the web, con­tent is king. Your site will undoubt­edly ben­e­fit from reg­u­lar doses of fresh con­tent, which will not only engage your audi­ence, but pro­vide active search engine opti­miza­tion. You shouldn’t have to enlist a web devel­oper and pay hun­dreds of dol­lars to make your con­tent changes. These days, it’s com­mon­place for a non-technical per­son to update vir­tu­ally all con­tent on your site with­out the urge to put their foot through the mon­i­tor. Not pos­si­ble with your site? It’s time to give your site, or your web devel­oper, the boot.

Does your site allow vis­i­tors to sub­mit infor­ma­tion to you eas­ily?

One of the most valu­able fea­tures of a web­site is the abil­ity to col­lect infor­ma­tion from your vis­i­tors, such as their con­tact infor­ma­tion or ser­vices they’re inter­ested in. Depending on your indus­try, this could be a crit­i­cal way for you to com­pete for cus­tomers. If there is no way to eas­ily gather help­ful vis­i­tor infor­ma­tion from your site, per­haps it’s time to kick it to the curb.

Do you have social media inte­gra­tion on your site?

As annoy­ing as Facebook can be at times, the nearly 1 bil­lion peo­ple who are using it sure would look great as your cus­tomers. So, if your orga­ni­za­tion has an active account on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest or the like, you should con­sider upgrad­ing your site onto a plat­form that inte­grates eas­ily with these social ser­vices. Otherwise, your site could end up in a lonely place.

Still not sure if your website is out of date?

Ask some friends what they think, compare your site to your competitors, or better yet, get a FREE 1 HOUR CONSULTATION.