Okay, so obviously not all six reasons here will apply to every reader, but it’s a list of things I’ve run across in the past that confirmed not only my thoughts, but that of prospective clients of mine, that it’s time to “start again”.

1. The “last modified” timestamp on the bottom of your page ends in something earlier than 2005. In other words, your site hasn’t been touched in more than 2 years. I could say a month, but that goes more into content than design. “Design” - as a whole - is part of what attracts people to something. Fashion, home décor, art, and web sites are all meant to draw people in via color schemes, lines, shapes, and space. To attract the eye in a pleasing manner. If your site looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1995, is using outdated, boring colors or too much whitespace, you’re going to draw the attention of no one’s eyes, and in fact will likely bore them enough to move on to something that looks more modern and updated. People on the internet FLEE from stale information. If your site looks stale, they’ll think your business and information - therefore potentially your knowledge and experience - is stale also.
2. Your friend’s nephew gave up his web design hobby in favor of a job at the local video games store. Okay, so it doesn’t matter where he got the job, unless it was as a web designer for a reputable web agency, it’s likely that he didn’t do that professional a job in the first place. Yes, I know it only cost you fifty bucks, but is it really the image you want to portray to your clients or customers?
3. The pages on your site are taking too long to load. You literally have less than something like 3.2 seconds to grab a user’s attention. If your images are too big in terms of file size, or you have too many of them, your pages are going to take forever to load, and people are going to click their back buttons or that cute little red “x” up in the corner. You don’t even get a chance to prove to them who you are, what your company is fantastic at, or anything! They’re gone. Wondering why you have no conversions? This could very well be the killer.
4. You need to make some minor changes (pricing, hours of operation, etc.) or additions, but your designer tells you that it’ll take 2 weeks and a hundred bucks or more. In this day there is no good reason (other than to keep raking in your money) that a web agency should be taking that long or charging you that much for minor things like that. Sure, there are great agencies that charge a little less, or give you a faster turnaround, but wouldn’t it be best if YOU could do it, as soon as you wanted, and with little to no “techie” knowledge? If your site were overhauled and built on a content management system (CMS) that’s super easy to use like WordPress, you could’ve had the changes made faster than the time it takes to dial the number of your designer.
5. You got roped into a situation that’s costing you $25 - $50 a month and you don’t even have access to upload files to your site. This was a type of “all inclusive” plan that some agencies offered back in the day (and some still use today), again to keep raking in your cash, that prohibited you from having access to your server via FTP (file transfer protocol), or to be able to make any changes what so ever. For a basic site, you should never be paying more than $8 a month for hosting, and once your site is live, the only thing you should be paying anyone for is to make changes you either can’t or don’t want to make yourself because they’re too difficult. Changing a price of your product should NOT be made to be too difficult for you. You also should have absolute, 100% access to everything on your site, including the server. You’re not a child, and if someone tells you not to play with something because it could break your site, it’s quite realistic to expect you won’t. Yes, I know there are people out there who can’t listen, but for the most part, if you break it, you pay them to fix it, so why would you bother?
6. Your customers have no way of keeping up with you. With the advent of RSS feeds, website subscriptions, email marketing and the like, there’s no reason your customers, or anyone interested in what you do should be kept out of the loop by having to continuously hunt down new information on your site. If you’re not offering to deliver that information to them, how much business could you be missing out on? Get an updated site, with fresh content, and you’ll have people constantly coming back for more.

So there you have it - there are far more reasons why you might need a site overhaul, but if you find yourself falling into any of the above situations, it’s time to definitely consider upgrading your site!

Popularity: 18% [?]

This is a question I get all the time: What does adding functionality to a web site mean?

Basically the conversation gets to this point when I start talking to people about how their sites need to be designed for their visitors, and not for the search engines or for rankings or what have you. Adding functionality to your site means that you’re giving it ease of usability and helping your visitors perform the tasks they’ve set out to perform when visiting your site. Regardless of what those tasks are.

For example: Your site is optimized for the phrase “blue widgets” because that’s one of your company’s most popular products. So when a visitor comes to your site after searching for “blue widgets”, they’re clearly looking for one of two things: a) They’re looking to buy blue widgets, or b) They’re looking for more information about blue widgets.

Adding functionality to the web site would mean to do some or all of the following:

• The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have a page for selling blue widgets (via a shopping cart system - if you’re not donig this yet, stop right now and get on it!), and a few pages about blue widgets. What do they do? Why are they better (or worse) than green widgets? Etcetera.
• Have a good navigation system. The functionality comes in when you provide links to all of these information pages from your sales page, AND from each other. Make the links stand out by putting them under a “Related information:” type header.
• Give your site visitors the chance to do a search for “blue widgets” from YOUR site. Give them the option of either searching just your site, or searching the web. More on Adding Search Functionality to Your Web Site.
• Allow your site visitors to share their stories about their experiences, or ask questions about blue widgets right on your site. This can best be achieved by either offering a “comments” section on your articles, or at the very least, asking for feedback and offering a contact form where they can submit their responses directly to you. Or both!
• Depending on your site’s back end, it can be very simple and easy to add photos in a unique way and further intrique and catch the interest of your site visitors. People want to see what they’re buying, and they want to see it in action. Create slideshows and not just thumbnails, and your visitors might just find themselves surfing your site’s other products just to see the pictures!
• Polls. Contests. Giveaways. Be it the color of your next big widget or just what else they’d like to see on the web site. People LOVE to give their input, as much as they love the chance to get something for free, so any way you can give them this opportunity, they’ll take it.
• Create a section of your site for “members only” access. Include “premium” articles, discount offers, and so on. This not only provides your users with a feeling of being important to you, but it also allows you to collect email addresses from people who are clearly interested in your company’s offerings, for sending newsletters or special announcements later on.
• Offer real time industry news feeds, live on your site. Again, people are coming to you seeking information - the more you give, the more they’ll remember you, and the higher the chance they’ll come back.

This list is by no means exhaustive. But the bottom line is that “brochure sites” are just a huge waste of time and resources these days. They bore people, and they don’t ever stand out to give the visitor any reason on Earth to remember you or come back. Gone are the days of simple one- or three-pages sites just to say “Hey, here we are.” Web sites like that have long fallen by the wayside, and have absolutely no hopes of ever coming back, thank goodness!

Popularity: 65% [?]

Okay - I will admit, yes, Flash can be cool looking. However I will forever turn down business when the prospective client tries to “demand” a fully Flash site. I won’t even get into the usability factors, like the fact that not all people have Flash readers installed on their computers. Despite spending over an hour explaining why Flash (even just a little “too much” in elements) is bad for SEO, I’ve had no less than three people in the past year get frustrated, tell me they’ll have to call me back, and I hang up the phone knowing and not caring that I’ll likely never hear from them again.

I’m going to make it plain as day why fully Flash web sites are bad.

Are you ready?

I can’t believe this is so hard for people to understand and believe sometimes.

Okay here we go:

The search engines cannot read the contents of a Flash file.

Alright, I’ll elaborate. One of the biggest, most necessary components to search engine optimization revolves around the content of a web site. Yes folks, content is still king. In order to best optimize a web site for the search engines, I have to tweak and mold the content on that site, so that when the search engines scan through it, they can pick up on what your site’s about. What’s important about you, your company, and your business. Since the search engines can’t read the contents of a Flash file, that means that you can put as many keywords as you want in there, the search engines won’t see it. If the search engines don’t see it, then they can’t help rank you for the keywords that relate to your site. If they can’t help rank you, you won’t get ranked.

“But Lara, there are Flash websites out there that show up at the top of the search engine results!!!” I can hear you cry out.

Yes, and those sites have either been around for quite some time and developed a “following” (in the form of many, many natural incoming links to the site), they belong to companies that are “known and trusted” by the search engines (for lack of a better term, they’ve been white-listed), or they’re using spam techniques to get there. The first reason can be achieved through internet marketing programs, but also takes lots of time - Lots. Of. Time. - especially when the site is full on Flash, and SEO is not an option.

The bottom line is this: If you want a Flash movie “header” or other element to your site, I’m perfectly okay with that. But no more than one element, and it can’t be your navigation (site links) unless we have those same links in hard-coded text elsewhere on the same page. If the site can’t be fully optimized for the search engines because there’s too much Flash, I’m going to turn your business away. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, and I’d advise anyone who is hell-bent on having a fully flash website to toss the idea of SEO right out the window. Internet marketing? Maybe. But if I can’t optimize a site for the search engines, I’m not going to want to take on a marketing project either, because part of the realm of internet marketing also involves SEO.

So there you have it. My final word on Flash. You can say it’s a tad bit angst-ridden, and I’m okay with that.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Does your site have a search function?

How do your visitors quickly figure out if you have what they want?

All the marketing in the world means squat if you don’t live up to the hype when visitors click your link. You’d be surprised at how much something so “trivial” like a search feature can mean to your site’s visitors. (And to your pockets!)

Google offers a search function via their adsense program. If you use Google ads as a form of revenue, you can easily add a search box that crawls the web AND your website, and produces the results on a page that you customize to match your website’s color scheme and logo. You can customize the search form itself to match your site, and you can add up to three URLs to the search, where your visitors can choose either the “web”, “site A”, “site B”, or “site C” to do their searching. When a visitor clicks on a link after using the “web” search, you will receive adsense revenue in your account. (No revenue is received when a visitor searches your site, however the default setting on the search box is set to search the web and it’s paid link results.)

If you’re not interested in Google or ad revenue, there are many other free search forms available. Freefind and Atomz are just two of them.

Where do I put my search box?

Your best bet is probably either in the top right or top center of your site, in a prominent location, and on ALL pages of your site. Visitors may enter your site from any one of your pages, and if they don’t find immediately what they’re looking for, they will be looking for either a search function or a way out (which means leaving your site within about 10 seconds… you don’t want that!)

Also, make sure it’s a text box, where users can type in what they’re looking for and then hit a button that does the search. Don’t make them click on another page to get to their search box, and then yet another to get their results, and limit the results to no more than 30 or 40 per page… slow loading results pages are a no-no.

To get targeted results…

Make sure your pages are optimized well for their content. If you title your pages “Page 1, Page 2″ - the search box won’t produce the best results for your site. If you title a page “Buy Widgets” - make sure the page is about buying widgets, so when the user enters “buy widgets” into the search box, your page will show up properly.

Use a clean, easy-to-follow navigational structure, and have a sitemap somewhere on your site using the descriptive page titles and descriptions.

Provide loads of relevant content, using keywords (but not OVERusing them), and you should find that your site visitors spend more time on your site than they did before… part in thanks to your handy-dandy search feature.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Okay, so quite often I find myself in the midst of a discussion about screen resolutions and web site display widths. The screen resolution is the setting of each individual person who uses a computer, and based almost solely on their own preferences. (Of course, sometimes, you run into a person who doesn’t even know that they can change their screen resolution, why they’d want to, or much less, how…)

On most modern computers (yes, this is important… “modern”), the screen resolution options range from 800×600 pixels all the way up to 1280×1024 pixels. The first number relates to the width, the second to the height. The (somewhat unfortunate) thing is that by default, many systems come with the lower-resolution 800×600 - which makes viewing designs that are specific for higher resolutions pretty annoying, as you’ll have to use the scrollbar at the bottom of the window to see everything…

(Information on changing your screen resolution settings in Windows XP or Windows 98)

My personal preference? My settings are at 1024×768, and you’ll find that the majority of people who are familiar with the benefits of a higher screen resolution will have this setting - some go even higher, but again, it’s personal preference.

So here’s the thing about designing for resolutions: If you already have a website and a good stats tracker, and you know for a fact that the majority of your site visitors use 800×600 screen resolution, then by all means, design a fixed 800-pixel wide site for that crowd. (Example: Sites that are built for residents living in countries with less than “modern” levels of technology, or sites that are designed for those with visual impairments.)

However if you’re not sure, or if there’s an even balance, my vote will always lay with the fluid width design scheme. Fluid widths will automatically resize based on the end user’s display settings (screen resolution) and in almost all cases, you’ll find that the site will look fantastic on any computer with any screen resolution setting.

If you’re stubborn though, and you want to stick to a fixed width layout, please limit yourself to no wider than 800 pixels, including any and all padding, margins, and borders. Even the slightest scrollbar at the bottom of a browser window is unsightly and annoying. Oh, and don’t forget to make the background color or image flattering, if not interesting… us “1024 users” really can’t stand a site that has a black background for the content, with big white borders on either side. It’d be much nicer to see all black, or all white, or what have you!

Here’s an example of an 800×600 layout:
(click image to view on full screen - you may have to click the image again to get it to full size when it opens in a new window, regardless of your resolution settings)

Now, here’s that SAME layout, but fixed, and inside a 1024×768 resolution monitor (the yellow space is there to represent the default background color - it’s NOT a recommendation! ):
(note, if your settings are at 800×600, you will have to “magnify” the image and then you’ll see that “scroll effect” at the bottom of your screen - again, you may have to click the image again to get it to full size when it opens in a new window, regardless of your resolution settings)

Popularity: 57% [?]