How to tell if your website needs a facelift

3 February, 2010

Just as the months seem to whizz by at warp speed, so the internet evolves and it's users change their tastes and how they choose to engage with a website. This is the reason why I have outlined some key ways that you can assess whether your website is behind the times.

Design with the user in mind

Perhaps the most important aspect of web design evolution has been the ever growing importance and focus placed on user centric design (or designing a website so that its effectiveness is maximised for its tagert audience).

This can primarily be seen in a site's architecture and how a user navigates through the site. It is more important today than ever that your website has a clear and easy to follow path to where a user wants to go. Navigation can no longer be just a long list of all the links on your website as was the case just a couple of years back. Careful hierarchical planning and smart and simplified design is critical to getting a user to their destination and having them stay on your site.

Another aspect of user centred design is how the content of your site is presented. It's almost a certainty that if someone lands on your site and it is plastered with as much as you can fit on each page without careful thought to context, they will leave immediately. You want a user to be able to get what is important for them, and suggest further exploring rather than bombarding them with everything but the kitchen sink. Designers today have a much firmer grasp of this concept than previously as we've started to adapt traditional design principles to the web.

Checking your statistics

Your website's statistics tell you a lot of things about your website, one of which are how many users are coming to your site. If you're noticing that the numbers are consistantly dropping, it may be time to have the site's SEO (search engine optimisation) tuned by professionals. It may also be attributed to your online marketing strategy, or lack there of, which can use many different mediums including social media, to get the word out there.

Another important statistic to have a look at is how long your users are staying. It's not uncommon to see an average staying time of well under a minute. However, if over time you're noticing that it continues to drop than it could very well have something to do with the way your website is presented as users are constantly evolving their tastes and expectations of what will be useful to them. This usually only takes a few seconds for a user to decide, which goes to show how important a good design is.

Typography is important

Web design has evolved to become a profession in itself, with principles and best practices largely borrowed from traditional print design. Typography on the web is one of these and has become absolutely critical to any good design on the web. In the past, it was enough to just have all of your content on the web, but now it is incredibly important to have this content carefully thought out and designed.

Just a few years back, it was trendy to have small text, and only minimal distinction between headers and body content. That has all changed. Now with users in mind, designers have inflated the text to a much larger and more legible size, and have greatly increased the contrast in size between headings and regular body text.

A website's tone or feel

With the arrival of the "web 2.0" revolution a few years back, the focus and direction of the web started to swing from being an information gateway to a user centred, interactive and engaging experience. A simple "brochure" type website that said who you are and what you did was good enough in the past, but with users being ever increasingly discerning when it comes to online engagement, your website really has to do a lot more.

Users now expect a much more personal, and friendly approach to their online experience. After all, you are trying to entice them to buy your products or services. In the past a business' website could simply be a very detached and very impersonal cluster of dull corporately toned content, but now users gravitate to businesses that go to the effort of making them feel wanted. So if your website feels looks and feels like a dull information brochure, it may be time to re-evaluate.

Conclusion

These are but a few of the key ways that you should be assessing your website's effectiveness in the current market. Reviewing your online presence regularly is critical to how your website will perform because the internet is such an incredibly quickly evolving tool where stragglers are left well behind. Can you afford to be behind the competition?

Blog post written by Ismail Koci of Feedia - Web Design Brisbane