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 If your site looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1995, is using outdated, boring colors or too much whitespace, you’re going to draw the attention of no one’s eyes, and in fact will likely bore them enough to move on to something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!

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