How often should you redesign your website?

What better way to answer this question, than to look at the reasons we had to recently redesign our own website? We’ll take a look at our old web site design, our recent effort to redesign, and discuss the question of when or how often often should you redesign your website.

Well our last website was designed way back in 2008. That’s roughly six years ago…and let’s just say…six years was too long. The good thing was the design was a strong, fresh design that lasted longer than most designs. There were plenty of reasons to redesign the site, including: update design, update content, update technology. There are several others, but these were the main reasons and are typical ones to consider when redesigning a web site.

Let’s take a look at each in a little greater detail:

Update Design
Updating the design means updating the visual look and feel of the site. It can include things like a new design layout, a wider layout for larger screen resolutions, new colors, photos, and anything else that visually changes the site design. Online design trends are constantly changing and from time to time, a web site will simply look “out-of-date” and need a new design in order to appeal to online visitors and customers.

Update Content
The content of a website includes text, images, videos, and anything other assets that contribute to the makeup of a site. When we talk about text content updates, we are also talking about updating your company messaging. While content management systems (CMS) have made ongoing text updates simple, a site redesign is a good time to revisit the overall company messaging, and to make sure to align your messaging with the current updated company goals and vision. Sometimes simple, ongoing text and image updates are not enough to properly reflect the changes within a company. A redesign is a good time to step back and realign the content of your site with changes that have and are occurring in a company or your industry.

Update Technology
We all know that technology is constantly changing. There comes a time when web technologies need to be updated in order to best serve our customers and remain competitive. Our old web site for example contained a Flash animation on the home page. That was a common technology in 2008. In 2014, Flash is still used but not visible on all browsers, especially mobile devices, like iphones, ipads, etc. While Flash is an example of a front-end technology, we opted to redesign our site and build our site on the popular WordPress CMS. Our last web design was done using Dreamweaver as the HTML editing software. Since that time, we have been designing more and more custom wordpress sites for our clients. It made sense for us to finally do the same for our own site. This technology update, is also a welcome one for search engine marketing reasons as well. These are a few technology updates that made a site redesign the right decision for us.

These a just a few compelling reasons to redesign a website. Sure, you can say generalize, and say that a website should be redesigned every two years or so, but the truth is, the answer is different in each instance and for each business. Some website designs can last years, with minimal updates, while other sites and business must be updated constantly in order to stay fresh and current.  It’s safe to say that these are a few reasons for site updates, and by occasionally looking at your site in terms of these areas, you can likely better determine if a site redesign is due for your own business.

We’re happy to discuss your san diego business website redesign project any time and help make and implement the right decisions for your company!