I’ve been a Web Designer for over ten years now, and boy-oh-boy, have I seen some doozies on the web, especially sites belonging to small- to medium-sized firms. I’ve written this somewhat tongue-in-cheek list of reasons to think about a new website. Do any of these situations fit your site?

It was created in the Twentieth Century. If your site was built in a four-digit year starting with 19, it’s time for a replacement. A great deal has changed in the near-decade that has passed since, and a number of these changes directly impact your search engine rankings. Not to mention that styles have changed on the web, and your site probably looks like it was created back in the 1990s.

It contains headache-inducing background colors or textures. Like the burnt orange and avacado green appliances from the seventies, the treatment of color and texture is a delicate thing, and popular colors come and go. Similarly, textures can easily become too busy and conflict with the text on the page.

When your customers ask if you have a website, you hesitate to tell them about it. Why is that? Is it ugly? Does it contain inaccurate information? You can’t remember its address? All good reasons to re-think the site and get it up to date.

Ugh. Background music. This is one of the most irritating things (next to blinking text) that you can put on a webpage. I absolutely never like the music, ever, ever, ever. I’ve been startled more than once by background music that suddenly springs forth from my speakers at ear-shattering volume into the peaceful quiet of my office.

The site is little more than a tri-fold brochure on the web. I’ve seen this type of ineffective website numerous times in the past. Brochures make the worst websites. Because a brochure is such a different medium than the web, it doesn’t translate well to the web. Websites made from brochures are typically too wordy, badly organized, not up to date, and very static (never gets updated).

Your main competitor’s site is much better than yours. No, you can’t really topple the likes of Amazon.com, but you can do better than your typical competitor. Spend some time on their site so you can learn how to distinguish your site from theirs, and so you can also learn what you like and dislike about the site. Ask friends, family, neighbors, customers, whoever, what they think of your site versus your competitors. From this information can come a new website that professionally reflects your business.

You’ve changed your logo, now the site doesn’t match it anymore. This applies to changes to business name, slogan, marketing plans, product packaging, etc. The most professional image is created when all of your customer-facing imagery, be it business cards, letterhead, brochures, flyers, and website all appear to tie together and represent the same company.

The 1965 telephone book is more up-to-date. Is your website hopelessly antiquated (even if it was made in this century)? In this day and age, depending upon the business you’re in, your website’s appearance and content is just as important as that of your bricks-and-mortar facility.

You hired ”some kid” to put it together for you cheap—and it shows! I can understand when a budget just doesn’t allow for a hundred hours of a professional designer’s time to lovingly slave over ever last pixel on your site. However, very inexpensive site templates exist out there that can give your site a professional, if not custom, appearance. No excuses.

It costs you a fortune every time you want to update your site. You invested in your site big time! Now, every time you want to update it, you must schedule time with a very expensive firm. One of my clients switched to us because with their previous web hosting firm, it cost them over $3000 every time they wanted to change anything  on their site (no matter how minor, even simple text edits). So, the client used to save up a year’s worth of edits and send them to that firm all at once so they only had to pay $3000 once a year for updates. Holey moley. You should update your site frequently, and it shouldn’t cost a bazillion dollars to do it.

Does your site have any of the problems listed above? If so, it’s time to take a closer look at your site and consider what to do about it. A few things wrong may only demand an update, but you should consider replacing your site. I know we’re in the IT business, but we update our site weekly, if not daily. And we’ve replaced it nearly every 18 months since I’ve been with the company (hopefully to make it better each time).

Ready for a new site? Always hire a professional web designer or learn how to do it right yourself. If you refuse or can’t do either, then at least find a site template out there that will get you started on the right track.

Of course, you can always call us.

Craig Samson

Content Management Systems (CMS) make it easy for non-technical people to update a website, to control who can see which web pages (or portions of web pages), and to allow a much more interactive website experience by supporting discussion groups, blogs, wikis, e-Commerce, simple data entry forms, and more.

Whenever we start talking with a potential client about their desire for a new or improved website presence, the first technical decisions are whether to build the website using a Content Management System. Based on our experience, we’ve developed some indicators to help guide our clients to decide when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

The following indicators suggest a solution that does not require a CMS:

• A single person is updating the site. A CMS provides more value when there are multiple people updating the site, by providing a centralized mechanism for updating the latest version of the site.
• Website updates occur less than once a month. At this low frequency, we find that people tend to forget how to login or use the CMS.
• The website simply presents information. Some of the real value in a CMS is in its ability to facilitate collaboration between you and your website visitors.

The following indicators suggest a solution where a CMS may be insufficient to meet your needs:

• Portability Concerns. If you want to be able to freely move your website to different hosting providers, you need to make sure that your CMS and associated data can move as well. As long as you can take your CMS with you (as is the case with Fandotech’s solution), you should be fine. If you can’t take it with you, you may be forced to rebuild your website from scratch at the new hosting provider.
• Custom business logic and database design. Some CMS systems (such as the one used by Fandotech) allow for creation of completely customized components that can do whatever you want. Even if your CMS supports custom components, there is usually some overhead to creating components so that they work within the CMS framework. If there is a lot of custom business logic and database design, it may be easier and cheaper to do this custom work outside of a CMS.

Brad Hurley