Although arriving at this number was not an exact science, our 3 decades in business have demonstrated the average lifespan of a website design to be about 2.5 years. That’s around the time our current clients start getting antsy for something new and exciting. It’s also when prospects tend to put feelers out for a new web marketing partner such as ACS to handle their website redesign. For our purposes here today, let’s refer to this phenomenon as the 30-month itch. Whether the project on the table is for a long-time client or brand new contact, we are not in the business letting you spend more than you have to on more than you need to. Learn below the slight difference between refresh, rebuild, and website redesign.
If your website’s visual vibe is growing a bit stagnant, it may be time to consider the options – we can help!
The Difference between a Website Refresh and Website Redesign / Rebuild
To better understand the difference between redesigning and refreshing a website, we’ll use the metaphor of a house. Let’s say you own a home or have invested in a property that could use a little work. Much like avocado-colored refrigerators and bright orange Formica countertops, the design trends that were dominant when you first launched your site may not have stood the test of time quite as expected. In real estate, we examine the “bones” of a home first and foremost. Does it have a solid foundation? Are the floors even? Are the support beams straight? Is the overall layout within the exterior walls structurally sound? If so, there is unlikely a need to bring the bulldozer in to start from scratch. The same is true for digital properties. In this scenario, a fresh coat of paint and updated appliances can have stunning, transformative results—without breaking the bank. Modernizing your existing site to improve the overall user experience and further integrate your brand is considered a website refresh.
A website refresh is a lighter lift, just taking the existing structure, design, and bones of the site and sprucing it up. Recommending some SEO aspects, conversion rate optimizing the pages to maximize path to convert, and incorporating design elements that make the website pop.
A website redesign, however, is much more involved. Back to our home renovation analogy; it’s the equivalent of smashing a wrecking ball through your fixer-upper and starting over from square one with completely new blueprints. This is a major overhaul and, while often necessary, there are sometimes less dramatic options.
How do you know when to refresh your website?
Certain situations will arise where you’ll know it’s a great time to refresh your website. Things like:
- Additions to your business that deserves a new portion of your website
- Updates to search engine’s algorithms that warrant a specific change
- Seeing conversion rates below 1% – may need to look at your path to conversion
- Been a year or more since you’ve last made any changes and it has become stagnant
- Tech Stack additions – adding any CRM, lead gen, nurture programs, or chatbots warrant a small refresh
- New Marketing efforts that require polished new landing pages used for a specific purpose
How Often Should You Refresh Your Website?
If your company has the time, funding, and patience for it, we recommend a site should be refreshed each year. Refreshing content and code of your site frequently also can send signals to the search engines signaling you’re taking the time to invest in user experience.
We commonly see four scenarios in which a company feels it may be time for a total website redesign:
- They are inspired by (or envious of) the sparkly new websites they’ve seen and are ready to scratch their 30-month itch.
- They have lost touch with their previous web designer and are in panic mode about the fate of their online presence.
- There’s a huge Google Algorithm update and site speed needs to be addressed, or images need to be compressed.
- They are going through a major rebrand, shifting their business focus, or changing their offerings.
There is usually a disconnect between a client’s assumption that their site needs a total overhaul and the reality of our options. For instance, changing the button colors from blue to green does not warrant a new website. However, discovering that years of bad code, a messy hodgepodge of untrustworthy plugins, countless bugs, and dysfunctional features are impeding the effectiveness of your website often does mean it’s time for a fresh start. You may be asking yourself, as a business owner, is this simply one of life’s unfair certainties we need to accept? Going through an epic online site launch every few years is just par for the course? We say no.
Your website may not be on the most solid footing currently—and that’s okay. At ACS, we aim to shift the online world’s mindset around the website redesign vs refresh debate with one bold statement: Your next website design should be your last website. What does that mean exactly? Glad you asked! By focusing on constructing a solid, future-proof foundation for your site build, we are setting the stage for a flexible, adaptable online presence that will evolve right along with your business. Obsessing over the behind-the-scenes details, ensuring every nail, bolt, and beam is perfectly aligned now, creates a digital property fit for long-term change.
Building Websites for Longevity
It’s easy to preach your next website will be your last website, but how can we guarantee that? Well, we can’t… BUT we can stack the odds in our favor by establishing a strong, stable foundation. The finer points of which will vary based on which platform your site utilizes as a CMS. Using WordPress, for instance, we would absolutely pay extra close attention to the following in the early stages of our construction project:
- Utilize a premium hosting service with a stellar track record that includes SSL, backup management, Php updates, malware protection, bank-grade security encryption, and fanatical customer support.
- Work on a child theme! Using a parent theme by default is one of the most critical mistakes you can make when building your WP website. Once you go down the wrong road at this stage, it can be difficult (or impossible) to backtrack later. This practice offers a much-needed layer of protection between your awesome customizations and the platform’s semi-frequent updates.
- Only employ reputable plug-ins and extensions (and keep them to a bare minimum). With every new plugin installed, you are opening up your site to potential security risks and versioning conflicts in the future. Aim for fewer than 15 plugins total and select only ones that have great ratings, plenty of current users, and updates often.
- Hacks can hurt you. Whether you yourself dabble in web development or you’ve hired a hotshot coder who gets a thrill from manipulating code, be weary! WordPress relies on an intricate universe of database tables, dependent files, dynamic loops, and included scripts. Hacking your way to a desired functionality may work for today—but opens you up to an epic site crash every time you update anything for the remainder of that site’s life. The more you tinker with core code, the more risk and uncertainty you inherit.
- Long-term SEO: when planning out your website design strategy, setting your site up for the long haul in organic rankings is the most ideal path for growth. A lot of people think SEO is a set it and forget it medium, but you have to keep developing content, updating pages and tweaking the page for algorithm updates. If you optimize the page up front for maximum visibility, then your page should grow as you add new fresh content to it!
- Take ownership of your site! You’d be surprised to learn how many companies we talk to who have zero access to their domain registrar, hosting provider, or CMS back-end. We get it. It was probably a whirlwind to get the website launched and you had your full faith and trust in the company or individual who was handling that for you. What happens when that budding pimple-faced web designer with all the promise in the world decides to become a dune buggy mechanic and stops responding to emails? You’re left with a web property that belongs to you—that you can’t touch. Be involved in the setup of your site. Make sure you have super-administrator privileges for all accounts related to your business. After your big launch, consider downgrading the account access of those involved in the build process.
READ: Cheap Web Design Will Cost You
Sometimes starting with a blank canvas is a good thing. Chances are if your current site wasn’t built with longevity in mind, a redesign or small refresh is our best course of action. As your company moves into the future, start to shift your mindset around the full website redesign every the and a half years. Wouldn’t it be nice to just make a few site-wide updates whenever you felt the 30-month itch come along? We’re entering an exciting time in the history of online marketing. We now have the tools and resources to build applications that last longer, hold up to change, and withstand the evolution of business.
Are Dropdown Menus Bad?
Trends in website design have evolved tremendously. Back in the beginning, it was like the wild west—no rules, just a mad dash to internet gold. So few sites actually existed that the general public couldn’t be all that critical of layout and user interface. Times have changed. If a user is unhappy with a website’s navigation, it’s onto the next competitor in two clicks. The rising demand for ease of use, captivating design, and intuitive usability has shaped how we construct websites today. Let’s look at the dropdown menu, for instance…
You’ve seen them everywhere—a simple menu bar at the top of a website that reveals more links beneath when hovered upon. This tool has been a staple in presenting the hierarchy of a site’s pages to the user. Some are more elaborate than others, but the primary objective remains the same: to present visitors with a complete and organized visual of the site’s content. Calling the trusty dropdown menu into question has been a recurring conversation among the web design community these past few years. There are quite a few holdouts (us included), but the writing’s on the wall—dropdown menus are dying.
Are Dropdown Menus Bad?
First and foremost, dropdown menus are not mobile-friendly. Sure, they might look pretty and function decently on tablets and phones, but they do not provide an ideal navigational experience. With half of your traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s foolish to ignore this reality. On a more macro scale, dropdowns tend to facilitate the creation of several thin pages, over hearty cornerstone content. It’s all too easy to believe you are doing your visitors a favor by neatly organizing your site’s dozens of pages into a handful of top-level categories. In reality, you are creating a confusing virtual mess and surrendering control of the user journey. The final argument against dropdowns is a bit subjective, but becoming more of a universal truth by the day—dropdown menus are ugly!
Do Dropdown Menus have any Impact on SEO?
For the most part, no dropdown menus do not have any effect on SEO. The user experience could potentially slow the site speed or discourage mobile navigation on your site but in terms of meta data, content and rankings, dropdown menus are simply a navigation item. The sitemap and navigation hierarchy will remain the same whether the menus are visible or not. So optimize your site normally!
Dropdown Menu Mobile Performance
With Google and all the search engines really focusing on mobile indexation as their top ranking factors, this needs to be considered. Dropdowns are terrible for mobile. The navigation needs to be completely visible and ready to be clicked by your fingers. If a user can’t see your hierarchy, there’s a great chance they won’t use it.
Dropdown Menu Alternatives
You didn’t think we were going to trash a beloved navigational tactic and leave you with no alternatives, did you? There is no need to alter the hierarchy of your sitemap. Parent and Child pages can continue to exist as you wish. However, now is a good time to reimagine how they are presented to the visitor.
Minimize and simplify your primary header navigation to just a few top-level links. This is the equivalent of someone typing in a zip code to focus a world map on one specific region. On these landing pages, you provide links, buttons, and shortcuts to the sub-pages beneath where it makes sense to do so. It’s all about context! Crafting your user experience in this way allows site owners to take back control of how people browse, learn, and buy online.
As of the date of this posting, we are working to eradicate dropdown menus here at ACS on our own site, as well as future client launches. Much like the old wild west, there are still no hard rules at play. Sometimes, a dropdown menu just makes sense. Take some time to evaluate your own website and look for ways to make your customer journey more fluid and intuitive.
Reach out to ACS Creative about web design services and get a quote today for your project!
Landing Pages That Convert — Yes, You Need Them
Landing pages should be a valuable part of your organization’s online marketing efforts. If you’re not already using them, you may be wondering what they are and what purpose they serve. They’re standalone web pages created for a specific campaign and are designed to encourage the user to take a single, specific action after clicking through from an email, ad or other online location. Whether you’re interested in lead generation or encouraging visitors to complete a call to action (CTA), landing pages can help you get the conversion results you want.
But my organization already has a homepage, do I really need a landing page?
The answer is simple — yes, you do.
Your homepage usually provides an overview of your business and probably offers visitors a variety of different options. A good landing page, on the other hand, encourages visitors to take one action — an action that you’ve selected and designed for conversion — with very specific content and links.
There are different types of landing pages, but the most commonly used ones are designed for lead generation. When done well, these targeted pages can be a valuable asset in your marketing toolkit. They provide upfront value to a visitor and allow you to collect information about your customers, or potential customers, usually through a form. Visitors complete a form that captures contact information and other details that will help you learn more about them and segment them for future campaigns. In return, they receive some type of branded content, product, or service — an e-book, newsletters, whitepapers, etc.
Other landing pages that convert tend to focus on a specific CTA button, redirecting visitors to a page where they can complete your desired action. The CTA could be to schedule a demo, click to call, order this product now — the possibilities are endless. You should use this type of landing page when you’re more focused on a visitor taking a specific action rather than collecting information.
Even if you’re not interested in lead generation or getting website visitors to complete a CTA, landing pages can be integral to your email marketing efforts. Using data collected from landing pages allows you to segment your audience and deliver the most appropriate content at the right time. No one wants to receive marketing materials that aren’t important to them or don’t line up with their interests. When you deliver clear, simple messaging explaining the value of what you’re offering, it shows your visitors or customers that you have their best interests in mind and aren’t sending them irrelevant content.
Using good landing pages in your email marketing efforts is not only effective but allows you to get creative — you’re able to test out various designs and text to determine what works best with your target audience. Once you know what works with your audience it should ultimately lead to higher conversion rates. Plus, landing pages are also highly measurable, giving you the ability to understand exactly how visitors arrived at your landing page. It’s also an opportunity to tie those metrics directly into your business goals.
If you want to expand your contact lists, improve and enhance your email marketing, and make your business more successful — it’s time to start using landing pages.
The Solution is Email
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for connecting with your target audience. You can use an email campaign to engage with your audience, sell products, share news or tell a story. You can target emails to current or future employees. Whatever your business goal, it’s a proven solution. Let’s take a look at the many ways it can help your company.
Grow Your Audience
Email marketing is a cost-effective way to engage with and grow your audience. It provides businesses large and small with an opportunity for open and interactive communications. It gets your brand image — including your logo, tagline, color palette and brand graphics — and name in front of your audience more frequently and will build brand awareness and recognition with your audience.
Studies show that customers prefer to receive marketing materials through email, making it an important strategy — it has a large reach but delivers your message as you intended, and with a high ROI.
Personalize Your Message
An email marketing campaign will allow you to personalize and target communications in ways that other marketing campaigns can’t. You’re able to segment your lists, ensuring you send specific content to specific people. Did you know that emails with personalization result in revenue and transaction rates that are six times higher than non-personalized emails?
Recruit New Employees
How else can you use email marketing to your advantage? As a recruitment tool. Just as consumers prefer email, so do potential employees. Clearly showing your brand image and sending the targeted communications can highlight the benefits of working for your company and help facilitate interest in new positions.
Communicate Internally
Communicating regularly with your staff to build and cultivate company culture can be done seamlessly through email. Regardless of your company size, email can deliver your company news in a single action. Maybe it’s a regularly scheduled e-newsletter or an exciting new announcement. Whatever the cause, email allows companies to communicate their values and culture not just through content but through consistent brand imaging, messaging, and tone.
If you have a question about how to advance your business, the answer usually comes back to a well-thought-out and designed email campaign targeted for maximum return.
Finding the Best Platform to Sell Online
If we’re learning anything during this pandemic, it’s that almost every small business can profit by selling something online. Without it, many brick and mortar storefronts and restaurants would be left without a means of income. Yet, you don’t have to be a traditional “shop” to use a platform to sell online.
Think about businesses like restaurants, dry cleaners, consignment stores or ice cream parlors. They can tailor what “goods” they can monetize and place on a platform to sell online. It could be gift cards, merchandise, books, memberships, virtual event registrations or meal kits. When your doors are closed (whether it be for 8 hours or 8 weeks), your business can still be generating income.
Here are some ideas for opening an online store that, even when we get back to more normal operations, you may find can contribute a valuable revenue stream.
With so many available, how do you choose one platform to sell online? The first thing to know is that with most of them, what you see is what you get. Be sure you understand what the specific platform can provide — because all the offerings differ. Customizing is either cost-prohibitive or not even available. Some have limited payment gateways or can’t accept pre-orders. So be sure you know what you need and if that platform will perform the way you imagined. Lastly, is the platform easy to use? We’ve seen that some can have set up that is intimidating to beginners, which can lead to frustration when the design doesn’t match their vision.
That’s where we step in. Just because you’re choosing an out-of-the-box platform, doesn’t mean it can’t be brought to life. ACS Creative can walk you through the finer points of these platforms. We can adjust themes that don’t speak to you. You’ll find that it’s not as easy as clicking a few buttons. You’ll still need a designer’s eye and technical know-how to create a successful site.
Let’s take a look at some of these online selling platforms.
We find that customers have the most success with WooCommerce. It’s an extension of WordPress, which is used for a vast majority of websites. It gives you a lot of control and creativity. WooCommerce works really well when you have an existing WordPress site and want to add functionality, whether you have physical or digital products, like a digital download or virtual product. The upsides are that it’s one of the most customizable platforms, it’s affordable and it becomes part of your site, unlike most other online selling platforms.
Shopify is another good option that is ideal for selling physical products for the side hustlers, solopreneurs and crafters. If selling a product, like quilts or t-shirts, is your core business and you don’t need a full website, it’s a solid choice — Shopify is optimized to sell products. For beginners, the set up is easy. You can get started in the morning and be fully operational that night. There are free themes and templates to get started. Just remember that you do give up customization: Tons of other stores could potentially use the same design. Platforms like this may have deals with shipping providers and provide discounts.
Although this sounds relatively simple, remember that Shopify is still complex, as it is an e-commerce platform hosted by the provider. Areas to watch out for are figuring out the shipping, taxes and payment tiers.
Both WooCommerce and Shopify have marketplaces to buy extensions and plug-ins to amplify the functionality. This is another area where you may need help. Even though the core can’t be adjusted, there are always ways of improving it if you have the design sense and are tech-savvy.
There are many other platforms out there, but most are not as user friendly or functionality friendly as WooCommerce and Shopify. Just remember the cheapest route most likely will not have everything you need. So, compare your options before investing your time, energy and money.
The investment of including a platform to sell online will help you diversify your sales channels offline and online, now and when we get back to our more normal operations.
Best Practices of Building a Startup Website
Introducing a new product or service to the world? A startup website can be your most powerful marketing tool. While brochures, sales sheets, direct mailings, and social media can be effective supplemental materials, a website offers unrestricted freedom to tell your story and educate your potential customers. You are in complete control of the user journey and visual experience. With that said, the perfect startup website should adhere to a common set of best practices to ensure its effectiveness.
What is a Startup Business?
Although your mind might naturally skew toward Silicon Valley tech companies when you hear the word startup, the concept is much broader. Whether you are launching the next biggest fitness app or a local landscaping company, any business in its infancy is considered a startup. This phase is your chance to set the stage and establish the future of your venture. Sure, you’re likely focused on customer acquisition and operations, but marketing is equally important. That’s where your startup website comes in!
Startup Website Best Practices
Attention spans are shrinking. You have a visitor’s attention for mere seconds—in which you must convince them to stay and learn more. This is actually advantageous for startup websites because your new business doesn’t have a whole lot to say just yet! We’ve compiled some best practices our team uses in site development for emerging brands:
Capture Their Interest
Use one big, impactful statement on your homepage telling visitors how you are shaking up the status quo. What are you doing differently than the others? Why should they care?
Less is More
As cliché as it may seem, a startup website is one instance where less really is more. Too much content can actually work against you. Your overall design and content strategy should be simple and straightforward. This approach will pique curiosity and push users to dive deeper.
Give Them Something
Find your perfect balance between less is more and informative. It may be more art than science but we’ve seen plenty of startup websites that skew too far on the side of mysterious and abstract. We’re not trying to make our customers work for it here—but instead give them only what they need to see in that moment.
Connect with Your Audience
Your company may be brand new, but using familiar lingo and keywords can help them feel connected to your product or service right away.
Plan for Growth
A good startup website will help your company get to the next level. From day one, be sure you’re using a domain name, logo, color scheme, sitemap structure, and content management system that can grow with your business. You may want to add a blog in the future or several static pages. Don’t paint yourself into a corner with a temporary site and brand elements that will need to be scrapped entirely as you progress.
Visual Stimulation
You’re the new guy (or gal) on the block and ready to disrupt your entire industry. Unfortunately, the overused handshake clip art on your homepage tells a different story. Elevate trust with your visitors by including original videos and photography whenever possible. This is especially true if you are selling a product, but just as important for any type of business. People want to see that you are real and legitimate. Utilizing stock photos that they’ve seen on a hundred other startup websites adds nothing to your story. Stock imagery certainly has its place if used tastefully, but don’t be afraid to let people in with authentic visuals.
Stand Up to the Competition
We’re seeing a big upswing in “competitor vs us” pages lately and they are wildly effective. Sure, your competitors might not be thrilled to go toe-to-toe with your business, but it’s a no-nonsense means of conveying your advantage to customers. Shopify is one of the major players doing this really well. Did we mention it has incredible SEO benefits and acts as a great landing page for paid advertising?
Follow the Trends
When it comes to the overall look and feel of your startup website, take cues from the latest trends in the design world. By implementing modern elements into your user interface, you give your company a hip and connected vibe—which improves the overall sentiment of your brand.
Be Directive
This point is paramount for all the launches we do at ACS, but even more so for startup websites. Whether you want your visitors to call, email, subscribe, or buy, presenting a clear call-to-action is essential for success. Don’t allow them to get lost. Formulate your content to always direct them to a common endpoint. Optimizing conversions is what this is all about!
Provide Social Proof
Display social proof prominently on your site to increase user confidence. This includes reviews, testimonials, social media comments, publicity, etc. Even early adopters don’t want to be first—so give them proof that prior clients, customers, and tastemakers are pleased with what you offer. Once you’ve collected enough social proof to add to your startup website, it will absolutely become one of your most effective sales tools.
5 Tips to Maximize Return on Ad Spend
Making every penny count has never been more important for businesses of all sizes. Many companies are finding themselves having to decide if advertising is worth the expense right now. Regardless of what may be going in the news or across the world, we believe paid marketing can always be effective. The key mindset in PPC advertising is to remain actively in tune with the ebbs and flows of not only your campaign, but the bigger picture as well. Here are our top five tips for getting more return on ad spend during an uncertain market:
1. Be Vigilant
Avoid irrelevant (or tone deaf) messaging in your ads by staying on top of global events, seasons, holidays, economic cycles, and other factors that affect the marketplace. To optimize your return on ad spend, you must always be in-line with and sensitive to what’s on your customers’ minds in that moment.
2. Change with the Times
Your campaigns should be treated as a living, breathing entity—not a set it and forget it effort. When there are changes and swings in the environments mentioned above, be prepared to change along with it. We can’t control the weather, but we can react to it. Major events aren’t distractions; they’re opportunities!
3. Monitor and Pivot
While you should be ready and willing to modify your ad copy, offers, visuals, and strategy to stay relevant with the times, there is such as thing as too much tinkering. It’s a delicate balance between gathering data and wasting money. Give your marketing adequate time to reach a large enough audience before making any drastic changes. Use the wealth of analytics provided in almost all ad platforms to execute smart, informed tweaks when necessary. Being certain of what isn’t working will help guide you to what will.
4. Optimize for Success
Whether you’re employing banner display ads, video ads, or search result ads, content is critical. First and foremost, the sentiment of the link a user clicks needs to be prominently reiterated in the page they land on. It seems like common sense that the messaging someone engages with matches what their interest is in that moment. However, you’d be surprised how often this detail is overlooked by advertisers. Therefore, if you are running several different ads, you may want to consider several different landing pages. Meet your visitors’ expectations and increase your conversions!
5. Understand Your Audience
Well, we’ve covered optimizing your messaging and user experience. Of course it’s time to discuss optimizing who sees your ads to begin with. Targeting too broad of an audience is one of the quickest way to burn through your budget without yielding results. No matter if you’re utilizing Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Reddit for PPC advertising, selecting the location, interests, and traits of your ideal customer is a critical step in setting up your campaign. Who are you really trying to reach? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their time? What are they looking for? Defining and understanding your customer avatar will help you answer these questions—thus minimizing irrelevant (and expensive) impressions and clicks.
Especially in an uncertain market, you’ll need to maintain control of how specific ads are and that people get what they expect. Remember that just because it’s working now doesn’t mean it will always work.
Top 10 Web Design Trends for 2020
In the world of web design, trends come and go. The websites of the early 2000s are as outdated as dad jeans. Something that was a must-wear just five years ago is a distant memory. As we move forward into this new decade, we share with you our top 10 web design trends for 2020 that we think will dress up your website.
1. Put it in Dark Mode
This is 2020’s hot topic, for sure. Light text on dark backgrounds was frowned upon and considered a somewhat “amateur” design choice for the past decade. Now, as people pay more attention to the long-term impacts of constant glaring light from their various devices, dark is making a case for itself.
2. Overlap Those Elements
Another trend that started to pique our interests in 2019 has a major foothold in the web design world this year. Throw out the rule book — break free of the stuffy grid and let your text, images and video battle it out on the screen.
3. Add More White Space
This trend has made our list before, but it’s not going anywhere. In fact, visitors are demanding more “breathing room” than ever in the content they consume. More empty space and easier to consume content is crucial in effective web design right now.
4. Have Some Fun
The world is having a bit of a dumpster fire moment in 2020 so far. Websites that offer a fun, colorful, light-hearted design will provide a welcome breath of fresh air for visitors.
5. Keep it in Motion
There are plenty of ways to make things move on a web page. This year, visitors are demanding more visual action in their browsing experiences. With the increase in internet speed and the introduction of 5k we are more likely to see video leveraged in web design and marketing moving forward.
6. Freshen it up with Illustrations
We’re on borrowed time with stock photos. Visitors are growing tired of seeing the same image of high fives and handshakes on every single website they visit. What began as a trend in the software and app space, custom (or at least somewhat original) illustrations are creating unique experiences on sites across all verticals.
7. Data Drives Marketing
Data-driven marketing is on the rise. People are paying attention to data more now than ever before. Data and statistics can not only augment marketing but can often drive results that traditional methods don’t. An infographic is a great way to present this information — and add that fresh illustration we just talked about.
8. Provide a Personalized Touch
Did you know that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase when presented a personalized experience? And, 90 percent indicate that they find personalization appealing. Those stats speak for themselves — and would make a great infographic, too!
9. Retain Loyal Customers
Putting an effort into keeping customers happy may seem obvious but is often overlooked. This can translate into creating better user experiences and showing a willingness to cater to the customers’ needs.
10. Add Chatbots
People are becoming more comfortable with online support systems. Chatbots will power 85 percent of customer service by 2020. The takeaway here is to not lose sight of the human experience as your company moves toward automated technologies.
If you’re in the market for a website redesign or rebuild, feel free to contact us here or learn more about our web design agency.
Website Redesign vs Website Refresh
Although arriving at this number was not an exact science, our 3 decades in business have demonstrated the average lifespan of a website design to be about 2.5 years. That’s around the time our current clients start getting antsy for something new and exciting. It’s also when prospects tend to put feelers out for a new web marketing partner such as ACS to handle their website redesign. For our purposes here today, let’s refer to this phenomenon as the 30-month itch. Whether the project on the table is for a long-time client or brand new contact, we are not in the business letting you spend more than you have to on more than you need to. Learn below the slight difference between refresh, rebuild, and website redesign.
If your website’s visual vibe is growing a bit stagnant, it may be time to consider the options – we can help!
The Difference between a Website Refresh and Website Redesign / Rebuild
To better understand the difference between redesigning and refreshing a website, we’ll use the metaphor of a house. Let’s say you own a home or have invested in a property that could use a little work. Much like avocado-colored refrigerators and bright orange Formica countertops, the design trends that were dominant when you first launched your site may not have stood the test of time quite as expected. In real estate, we examine the “bones” of a home first and foremost. Does it have a solid foundation? Are the floors even? Are the support beams straight? Is the overall layout within the exterior walls structurally sound? If so, there is unlikely a need to bring the bulldozer in to start from scratch. The same is true for digital properties. In this scenario, a fresh coat of paint and updated appliances can have stunning, transformative results—without breaking the bank. Modernizing your existing site to improve the overall user experience and further integrate your brand is considered a website refresh.
A website refresh is a lighter lift, just taking the existing structure, design, and bones of the site and sprucing it up. Recommending some SEO aspects, conversion rate optimizing the pages to maximize path to convert, and incorporating design elements that make the website pop.
A website redesign, however, is much more involved. Back to our home renovation analogy; it’s the equivalent of smashing a wrecking ball through your fixer-upper and starting over from square one with completely new blueprints. This is a major overhaul and, while often necessary, there are sometimes less dramatic options.
How do you know when to refresh your website?
Certain situations will arise where you’ll know it’s a great time to refresh your website. Things like:
How Often Should You Refresh Your Website?
If your company has the time, funding, and patience for it, we recommend a site should be refreshed each year. Refreshing content and code of your site frequently also can send signals to the search engines signaling you’re taking the time to invest in user experience.
We commonly see four scenarios in which a company feels it may be time for a total website redesign:
There is usually a disconnect between a client’s assumption that their site needs a total overhaul and the reality of our options. For instance, changing the button colors from blue to green does not warrant a new website. However, discovering that years of bad code, a messy hodgepodge of untrustworthy plugins, countless bugs, and dysfunctional features are impeding the effectiveness of your website often does mean it’s time for a fresh start. You may be asking yourself, as a business owner, is this simply one of life’s unfair certainties we need to accept? Going through an epic online site launch every few years is just par for the course? We say no.
Your website may not be on the most solid footing currently—and that’s okay. At ACS, we aim to shift the online world’s mindset around the website redesign vs refresh debate with one bold statement: Your next website design should be your last website. What does that mean exactly? Glad you asked! By focusing on constructing a solid, future-proof foundation for your site build, we are setting the stage for a flexible, adaptable online presence that will evolve right along with your business. Obsessing over the behind-the-scenes details, ensuring every nail, bolt, and beam is perfectly aligned now, creates a digital property fit for long-term change.
Building Websites for Longevity
It’s easy to preach your next website will be your last website, but how can we guarantee that? Well, we can’t… BUT we can stack the odds in our favor by establishing a strong, stable foundation. The finer points of which will vary based on which platform your site utilizes as a CMS. Using WordPress, for instance, we would absolutely pay extra close attention to the following in the early stages of our construction project:
READ: Cheap Web Design Will Cost You
Sometimes starting with a blank canvas is a good thing. Chances are if your current site wasn’t built with longevity in mind, a redesign or small refresh is our best course of action. As your company moves into the future, start to shift your mindset around the full website redesign every the and a half years. Wouldn’t it be nice to just make a few site-wide updates whenever you felt the 30-month itch come along? We’re entering an exciting time in the history of online marketing. We now have the tools and resources to build applications that last longer, hold up to change, and withstand the evolution of business.
Local Marketing 2020 Series: Print Advertising
Old habits die hard. Many established small businesses have placed advertisements in hometown newspapers, swap sheets or penny savers for decades. They often continue to do so simply because they always have. However, in the current landscape of local marketing, may not be the best use of your limited budget.
Measuring Print Advertising
First of all, it is extremely difficult to know how many people saw your ad, became more interested in your business or purchased from you because of that ad. Secondly, why pay for people to see your ad if they don’t care about it? With online advertising, you essentially only pay for potential customers who are interested in what you offer.
Do yourself a favor and conduct an audit of where you’ve spent your marketing dollars in the past and ways you might better use those funds in 2020. That could include SEO, email campaigns or pay per click online ads. Of course, print advertising shouldn’t be ruled out altogether — print isn’t entirely dead after all. If you’re going to advertise on tv, radio or in the paper, at least measure the results so you can track your return on investment.
Does Print still Drive Conversions?
We have seen print advertising work very well if you have a very viable list to send to. Users take action from a specific landing page, and asked to convert. If your audience knows of your business and has a need for your service, that partnership is simple!
As a small business, budget matters and time are your greatest commodities. You don’t have enough of either to spare, so why take chances? Use the proven tips included in each of our Local Marketing Series blogs to devise a sensible, yet effective, local marketing strategy for the rest of this year. Be sure to measure your results along the way as you watch your business grow in 2020!
Local Marketing 2020 Series: Email Marketing
In our humble opinion, email marketing is absolutely one of the most effective means of increasing revenue and facilitating growth for virtually all companies of any size in any industry. Yet, small businesses tend to not take advantage of this marketing method. I’m sure you’ve seen the television commercials of the landscaper or interior designer sending their promotional email and bracing for a flood of customer activity. They are panicking that one of two things will happen. First, they will receive no clicks at all and feel defeated that their efforts were for nothing. Second, and this is where the good type of stress comes in, their inbox is flooded with orders! The latter can (and should) be you.
To run a successful email marketing program, you must look at it in two parts: Email Collection and Email Execution. A beautifully crafted HTML message that is only seen by you and your closest friends might as well be a tree falling in the forest. Building your database of subscribers needs to be an ongoing priority. The larger the list, the bigger the result.
Always encourage customers to sign up in-store and visitors to your website to join online. Offer incentives for subscribing, such as exclusive offers, special event invites, discounts, etc.
Don’t send emails too often or your open rate and unsubscribe rate will suffer. Try to keep your lists segmented by what product or service the individual purchased to ensure future emails are relevant to them. Utilize an email marketing platform, such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or MadMimi, for storing your database, sending campaigns and monitoring results. Be sure to watch your analytics to gain perspective on which emails performed best and what your customers are most interested in.
Along with the collection of your email list with valuable contacts, if you have access to physical addresses, we’ve seen direct mail pieces go out and turn into five times the return on investment. A small sample size sent out to businesses or consumers in the area can go a long way. Increasing your visibility, creating opportunities and potentially gaining new clients, you’d be surprised!
Bottomline is to gather those emails! Because email marketing can provide higher conversion rates than most other marketing tactics, you never know how valuable they can be until you use them.
Look for our final Local Marketing Series blog, where we’ll explore the tried-and-true tactic, print advertising.