Ok, so you’ve had the same website for years and it has worked for you in terms of an “online business card” but that’s about it. It looks old, however, and isn’t that enticing to read through anymore…so you should probably think about updating your website design a little bit. Here are 5 things you can do to get your site updated without having to re-write the content for your whole site or spend lots of money to do a full re-design.

Updating Your Website Design

Pictures

1. Update some pictures! People look at pictures way more often than they read a paragraph. Look at the content on your site…read it paragraph by paragraph and try to pick out a picture that would represent each paragraph or section of your website. If you are describing a service your company performs, get a picture of someone doing that. If it’s a product you sell, get a picture of it and/or a picture of someone using it. The key to this is to get REAL photos….don’t go out and buy some stock photos of a woman working at a computer or a team of people staring a the camera. Get those photos taken of you and your staff, products, services, etc and use them on your site. This will significantly increase your legitimacy as a company for potential customers or clients.

Fonts

2. Update the fonts. If you’ve had your site live for a while, you probably have boring old fonts. Go to Google Web Fonts page and look through some available fonts that are free and ready for use. Find a couple fonts that fit with the theme of your business and the branding you have setup. It’s usually a good idea to pick a bold font for titles and and a very readable font for the paragraphs. If you’re one of those people who have no idea what to choose or how to choose it….here is a site that has several font pairings that work very well. Once you have two picked, send them to your web designer and have them update your site to use the new fonts. Just updating some fonts can really polish up an old looking site.

Make it Responsive

3. Make your site responsive! Responsive is the “buzz word” right now….it means that your website can re-adjust itself based on how big the screen is that your visitor has. If they are on a regular desktop they get the full widescreen experience, or if they are on a small screen or table things will get re-arranged to fit the smaller screen better. Lastly, if they have a small device or phone then the font size can be bumped up and everything will be moved into a one-column layout. This is a bit more of a costly update, but can be done relatively quickly using your existing site layout if your web developer has experience with Bootstrap or Framework.  Using one of those frameworks with your existing site design can help make your site responsive with minimal work. In our experience, retro-fitting an existing static website design that we coded several years ago into a responsive enabled website can take as little as one days work. Making your site responsive allows more people to experience your website in a pleasing manner.

Update Content

4. Proof read the content! Make sure all the information is up to date. Consider changing a sentence that says “been operating for 7 years” to “been operating since 2003” so that you don’t have to update the number of years you’ve been in business every year. Having up to date information is very important. If your copyright info still says “2011” on it, you might want to fix that!

Video Engagement

Flagship Accounting has a great video on their homepage.

5. Add a video! If you are a decent business person, you’ve got a mission statement and/or you’ve got an elevator pitch that you say when you tell people about what you do or what kind of product you have. Record a short video with you describing your “mission” and put it on your website. If you use a service like Wista, you can add all sorts of extra features into the video so that Google can index the video and help get your site ranked (SEO) better.

There are actually many, many other things you can do to update your website design and change it from being an online business card to being a vehicle to drive customers or clients to you, without you needing to be an annoying advertisement. We’ll be posting more about things you can do to move your site into an income generator instead of an expensive advertisement, so watch our blog for more.

Of course, Sonic Interactive Solutions can help you implement all of these tips.