All year long, the hot topic has been mobile web sites. The need for mobile sites has had the most buzz and has been our hottest selling item this year by far. However, in recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about refreshing and improving standard web sites. The ones we redesigned for clients in the third quarter are making excellent progress on search engines and are getting consistent higher new traffic with calls going up as well. And, lately, people who are tired of their old web sites that have stagnated, are calling about new web sites.
Summer is a great time to rebuild your site. With the longer days, people seem to have that little extra time to do something for themselves and the truth is, a redesign takes a lot less work on the client’s part than when you design a site from scratch. Using the bones of your current site as a starting point saves you time. It doesn’t save the designer any steps but it does speed the process.
Redesigns usually have two focuses. The first is to make technical improvements. It is pretty clear what works for a steady Efficient Keyword SEO approach like the one we employ so redesigns are often focused on making the site more sturdy for ongoing work related to organic search. Secondly, a redesign focuses on improving the graphic presentation and flow of information. When it is available, an analysis of your existing traffic patterns help us determine the best ways to lay out the site. And, often, revising your navigation can help with your relevance for some terms (a factor determined by search engines in determining organic rankings).
What often triggers a redesign? Lately we have seen people choose redesigns because of a lack of performance by the site (failure to acheive better rankings despite being optimized, short visit time, high bounce rate (people leaving the site right away) or dwindling phone calls from the site (which can be tracked best with a dedicated tracking number). Or sometimes, people have the foresight to realize that their site is old and an investment in that first impression makes all the difference sometimes.
For everyone who has interest in redesign, we still have two months left on our summer web site special. That specials is a Flash/HTML web site (the most popular choice among our formats) at regular price ($7500) with four minutes of web drop video for FREE (a value of $4800). This offer is good through the end of August. If you are interested in redesigning your site, please let me know at donald@dogstarmedia.com.
