Update Your Website

We have given up on a yearly refresh for the site but our regular visitors will have noticed a few recent changes. Blog posts about every time we have updated our website are pretty boring but the reasons will be a lot more interesting to anyone with their own website.

Website design and style can vary a lot. There are a lot of websites that are being churned out at the moment that all look the same. Vector graphics are increasingly popular at the moment so what can you do to make your site stand out?

We decided to use vector images too - it is the current trend after all. Rather than go with generic stuff though we decided to make up some vector cartoon images of the team, including my dog Toby, seen on the right, to keep the new images personal to our business.

We have also incorporated those images right across our branding with email signatures, advertising and auto responses that have a little personality. Just email hello@memorysmithcomputing.co.uk to just what I mean.

As soon as we started adding this content to the website we realised that some of our original content no longer worked so a total overhaul started. The problem with a total overhaul is that you do not want to confuse customers who visit your website with a totally alien experience.

We started out by adjusting the colour palette to keep with our brand guidelines but still give the site a much cleaner look. From there we moved the content around and altered nearly all of the images on the site to be vector based graphics so that everything flowed the same.

Next we had to make sure that the mobile version of the website still worked. With around 75% of all google searches now taking place on mobile devices it was critical to still have a site that worked and would convey all the required information.

When you come to work on the mobile version of your site you will find that the new google algorithms for indexing your site come into play in a big way. Minimum font sizes for readability, items that are not too close together so they do not overlap when they render and a clean interface for navigating the site are musts.

All of this is critical for a website that works in the mobile age as the first impression you give your customers is very likely going to be your mobile website, before they look at the desktop version in all its glory.

Even when you have jumped through all those hoops you still need to have google crawl the site and look for errors. These errors might not look like much of an issue for you but you don't matter at this point.

Google decides how it presents site to people using its search services and how well it ranks your site will determine whether you are on the first page or five pages down the list.

Website clicks on the first page of a search result sit at around 80% which is all the way down to 40% on the second page and by the time you reach the third page of search results you will only stand a 10% chance of someone clicking on the link to bring a customer to your website.

Even worse - after you have done all this work and ticked all the check boxes it can take 4 to 6 weeks before all the effort you have put in gets reflected in search results.

Now - here comes the real stinker. Website that are not updated frequently, either with blog posts, news articles or customer testimonials (to name a few items) will automatically start to fall by the wayside. In fact, before your very first amount of hard work starts to pay dividends, you could be hurting your site by not adding more and fresh content.

All of the above is just what we have found whilst we updated our own website and there is so much more that we could say. Enough to write a book in fact.

If you have a website and want some tips or guidance on how to make the most of it then give us a call.