Would you consider the task of overhauling your company’s website an annoying distraction from other responsibilities weighing on your time, like interacting face-to-face with your employees and customers? If so, you might wonder whether how you could relieve that particular burden.
You could be particularly excited by the prospect of crafting your website’s overall design and infrastructure just once, leaving you to refresh the content regularly. However, is this feasible?
Are there particular timeless essentials of web design?
You might occasionally stumble across a rival company’s website that has been online for at least a decade and remains functional. How has the competing company managed this? For all these years, have they been keeping some special secrets about web design under wraps?
It is true that, under the hood, a website has many elements capable of feeding into its long-term relevance, not to mention resilience to potentially fickle tastes of web users. However, you might still be garnering a misleading impression of how effortlessly that website has been maintained.
Frameworks: the cogs of your website
If you can excuse us becoming somewhat technical with our language here, we will say that frameworks in CSS, PHP and JavaScript are indisputably vital to your website. This is because they underpin many of your site’s features – such as visual elements – which visitors will notice quickly.
However, if you don’t keep your site’s frameworks updated, security holes could open up and load times could slow down. These factors could have unwanted effects on your site’s Google rankings.
Make your Content Management System easy to use
You might be familiar with the mantra of “content is king”, and it has more than a little truth to it in the SEO world. Like your frameworks, your CMS needs to be kept updated. If you fail to heed this advice, you could leave your website’s content unnecessarily tricky to refresh.
This can bode poorly for your attempts to keep your site relevant with search engines. Meanwhile, sticking to outdated versions of a CMS is also a risk factor for security vulnerabilities.
The importance of making a great first impression
It’s worth emphasising that speeding up your site’s load times can be particularly influential on first impressions of that site. It can take just seconds – or even milliseconds – for someone to judge your site and, by extension, the organisation with its name and logo on that site.
For this reason, you can’t always trust web users to be patient before they start assessing your site. If it doesn’t load quickly or properly, a visitor could be too tempted to click away.
Once you have trimmed load times, a visitor could still be repelled by your site if it feels unsafe or, quite simply, doesn’t look nice. You need to update frameworks to keep them secure, while changing tastes can make even a good-looking site look old-fashioned over time.
In light of this, you could feel strongly incentivised to phone us on 01325 582112 to arrange a web design refresh.