Looks matter - Why savvy small businesses redesign their websites regularly

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Great design is about much more than beauty. It's also about functionality. And, whether we like it or not, there's an element of fashion too. All you need to do is keep a weather eye on Twitter and you'll notice a constant stream of people announcing site redesigns. Follow a few links and you'll notice how different websites look these days. 

Yesterday I ran across one of those text only sites from the very early days of the internet. Weirdly it was still ranking in Google, but that's another story! 

The page had a white background with four different text sizes and four different fonts, one of which was Times Roman. Which is a lovely font. But it looks very odd in an online context when almost everyone uses sans serif fonts for readability. Big, bright blue headers were emboldened and underlined, with red subheads and black body text. No illustrations or images, no interactivity, no columns... just a page that looked exactly like a very amateur, poorly formatted Word document. It was extremely nasty to look at and didn't exactly encourage trust. Quite the opposite.

Whether you consciously realise it or not, when you spend time online you become accustomed to the way new sites look and over time, ageing sites start to look old fashioned. 

A redesign can make your site work better, load faster and provide a much more enjoyable visitor experience. It can make your sales conversion process smoother, more efficient and more logical when your designer brings the latest technologies and tools into play. A redesign can even help boost your site's visibility in the search engine results by using the latest coding protocols and taking SEO into account automatically. 

An attractive, modern, crisp website with a nice, simple flat structure can do wonders for your bottom line. If your site is more than three years old, it's high time you took another look. 

Our Chris is your man, and he designs directly onto one of the planet's best back end CMSs, the marvellous Adobe Business Catalyst platform.