A web design company, an advertising agency and a software vendor walk into a client’s office. The client asks, “How often should we redesign our site?” The agency replies “two years.” The software guy says “three years.” The website designer says…

This isn’t a joke. I was actually in this meeting. There were eight people from three companies in a conference room and another two more people from another company on speakerphone. My answer at the time was four years, based on that business and their industry. Since then I’ve thought more about the question and the factors that determine the answer.

What is the lifespan of a typical website? My short answer is 2-5 years, but that’s a pretty big range. Most experts would just say “it depends.” But what does it depend on? Here we’ll look at the reasons why a site lives a long happy life, or if it gets old fast.

Website life expectancy factors

Here are the main factors that I’ll breakdown the factors into two groups: your business and the site itself.

Your Business

• Is your business changing fast? Any fundamental changes coming up?
• Do you run a lot of promotions or events?
• Are you in a creative or technical industry? Times change faster for some than others.
• Do your visitors have high expectations? Do you have to show (or teach) them a lot to get through to them?

Your Site

• Does the site look narrow on your screen?
• Is the design “trendy” or cutting edge?
• Do you rely heavily on search engine traffic?
• Is the site difficult or costly to update?

The more times you answered “yes” to these questions, the more likely the website life span is closer your website’s lifespan is to two years than five years.

Example One:

Classic design for a non-profit with a nice content management tool and a built-in blog. It’s a flexible site for a business that doesn’t change too rapidly, for visitors that who are mostly looking for information.

Lifespan: 5 years

Example Two:

Contemporary website for an interior design company. The site has a Content Management System but it’s not very flexible because the design is more about beauty and impression. Visitors have high expectations and want to be impressed.

Lifespan: 2.5 years

Live fast, redesign young.

If the nature of your business puts you on the shorter end of the scale, you may plan on a major redesign in shorter intervals: every 2 years or so. This cycle will guide design and content decisions. A site that is designed to live a shorter life may have more graphical content (charts, infographics, page-specific headers and animation) and more graphic navigation (buttons instead of text, links). In other words, design may be more about presentation power than flexibility and ease of updating.

Time to pull the plug

Of course, you can keep a website active long after it’s outlived it’s usefulness. But you risk becoming one of those people who say, “I have a site, but please don’t look at it.” You’ve met people like this. They’re so embarrassed that the look and content are so out of date, they truly don’t want anyone to see their website. At this stage, the website is actually hurting the business. Imagine having a marketing piece that you want to hide from the world!

How to extend your site’s lifespan

Now there are ways to take months or even a year off the look of your site*!

• “Page Injections” – New templates. Maybe you really just need a new landing page design or a better contact page with a form and a map. This targeted procedure can focus on trouble spots where the aging is worst.
• “Nip and Tuck” – Tighten up the design with a few style-sheet changes. Refining the type (snip, snip) and making a few tweaks to the color palette (snip, snip) can help bring things up to date.
• “Face Lift” – Home page redesign. This is a slightly more drastic procedure and can actually be a bit pricy.
• “Flash Lift” – If you have a Flash piece, consider a new animation. This is a surgery-free (no coding) option that can really change the look of your site.

*These techniques were not tested on animals.

Bottom Line

When you, your business or your visitors change, your website ages. It’s old as soon as it’s out of sync with your business and is not getting you those measurable results. Keep it as young and fresh as possible, but be ready to make the tough decision to redesign. And when you do, think ahead as far as possible.

-Andy Crestodina
Principal/Strategic Director
Orbit Media Studios, Chicago IL

Andy leads business development for Orbit and connects clients with the firm. Within the company, Andy oversees sales, strategy and client service. Andy employs his extensive knowledge of marketing, interactive media, usability, and search engine optimization to develop the most practical and viable web solutions for both current and potential clients. In addition to establishing relationships with new clients, Andy leads Orbit’s design and production collaboration with agencies throughout Chicago and he is on the Technology Committee for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. Andy is a graduate of the University of Iowa, where he studied Mandarin Chinese and became certified to teach. Andy also writes writes articles on interactive marketing strategies for The Orbiter, Orbit’s monthly newsletter.

One of the key elements of running a profitable web design company is ensuring you don’t waste time going backwards in your design process. The easiest way to do this is by creating key sign off stages with your customers and getting agreement that changes out of sequence become chargeable.

Stage 1) Signed order with T & C’s and a deposit

This by far the most important! When a lot of companies first start out, they think they will get more customers by not tying them into an agreement. Maybe they are embarrassed to ask for a commitment or can’t be bothered to take the time to draw up an agreement. Many design the homepage and only at that point ask for commitment. Will this get you more completed sales? NO! Will this leave you doing lots of free work? YES! It has been proven that if a customer is serious about having a website they will have no problem with signing an order form and paying a deposit. You may have less people instruct you to start work but you actually complete the same number of sites. You will of course have much more time to spend on our customers who actually want a website Stage

2) Sign off Homepage

Once the homepage design has been agreed by the customer get them to sign it off before designing the rest of the pages of the. If it’s a 10 page website and the customer decides they would like to change the menu position the problem is multiplied by 10. If changes are required after sign off that is fine but it then becomes chargeable.

Stage 3) Sign off for coding

Get the customer to sign off all pages prior to coding, including images and content. This means that the guy who is doing the coding has everything he requires. This will cut your requirement on coding resource instantly. Prior to the sign off many web designers spend more time making changes to work that had already been agreed than coding new websites.

Stage 4) Sign off to go live

Once the website is coded put it on a temporary URL. This gives the customer a chance to navigate the site and check copy, images and features of the website. Conduct product tests at this point to ensure contact forms etc work. Once you receive this sign off we issue customers with an invoice for the balance of what’s outstanding. Once that invoice is settled put the site live. Waiting for final payment before putting the site live helps give the customer a sense of urgency when settling his bill. When first considering adding sign off stages you may worry that it would slow the project completion time down. It in fact the opposite effect will happen; websites will be completed quicker because you won’t have to go backwards. The customers that have a genuine reason for changing their minds will simply pay for those changes.

Following this sign off procedure will protect you from constant unpaid work and allow you to concentrate on building a profitable web design company!

The page a visitor first hits when coming to your website is called the landing page. All websites have them, even if they do not call it by that name or are completely unaware of its importance. There are many ways to get to a landing page, from search engines to email marketing to online advertisements. As you can see, a good landing page can make all the difference in your conversion rate and how many sales you make, or help you with any goal that you are aiming for in creating your website.

Here are some tips to help you along the way to an amazing landing page:

Custom Landing Pages: Each special offer that you provide should have its own landing page, and the content should be very similar to the ads that link to it. It is a mistake to send all your traffic to your homepage or a page that details all kinds of other offers. These will distract more than entice and you may not make the conversion at all.

A Call to Action: The visitor must be invited to take action, to do something that will complete the transaction. This is often the purchase of a product, but it could also be a subscription or the providing of information. It all depends on the website that you are running and what you want to accomplish with it.

Keep It Clear: Do not clutter your landing page with unneeded information. Just the facts, or in other words, keep it down to what is necessary for your visitor to make a decision and take action. Anything is a distraction away from the content and away from the opportunity to make a conversion.

Keep It Focused: A theme is developing here, as you might have noticed. Avoid distractions on the landing page. Always remember what the page is designed to do and let it do its work without tempting the visitor to look at other things or go other places. It will cause confusion at best and cause the visitor to leave forever at worst.

Keep It Simple: Get straight to the point. You’ve got them at your landing page. There is no need to sell the visitor with Flash and eye-popping images. Sites that are “too busy” have poor conversion rates.

Snappy Sales Copy: You will need a decent writer to give visitors that hook that makes them stay once they have arrived. Remember to keep it clear, focused and simple. A paragraph should not cover half a page. Keep everything straightforward and use titles to focus things even more.

Load It Up Quickly: Eight seconds should be the very most time that it takes for your page to load completely. Not everyone has broadband, so be sure that your page loads in a reasonable amount of time even on dial-up.

Pass the Test: Testing and changing the landing page according to the results is an important step to achieve the best possible conversion rate. Try creating multiple landing pages and see which ones work the best. Once you know what works, you can fine tune it even more for optimal results.

Katie Stevenson – is a highly successful and productive freelancer; with expertise in all aspects of commercial writing. Katie has experience in everything from writing web documents and print articles to editing short projects and full-length eBooks’. She is also a speechwriter for major corporate executives. Contact Katie at < http://www.freelancewritingdesk.com

The number of online customers continues to grow as the growth of the internet continues. Your business relies on the ability of your website to attract these customers, get them engaged in your message and build enough trust for them to contact you.

It’s important that your customer can find their way around your website easily. A clean and simple web design is always best for this very reason. Visitors to your website want to be able to navigate around like it’s second nature. No one wants to spend any amount of time trying to figure out how to do things on your website. All that they want is to be able to find the products and services they’re looking for, and to do it quickly. Flash and glitzy techno-tricks do not impress someone who knows what they’re searching for. Scrap the flash.

Today, Web 2.0 is all the rage.So it’s important to include a place for your visitors to communicate with you. Use a blog and let your visitors comment. Also make links to your Twitter and Facebook pages available. Clarity should be the first priority on each of the pages on your website. It should be readily apparent as to what the page is all about, and easy to understand.

Most of our clients want direct-response websites and so we make almost all of the pages into a contact page. We invite the visitor to send a note, or to call in. This works really well to get customer responses. Of course this isn’t traditional web design which says one contact us page. But it works for us.

You also need to keep the search engine bots in mind when designing a website. The ‘bots of course are the Google Bot, Bing, and Yahoo. So you need to make sure that they can easily navigate your site. If the “bots” can’t get around your site because of dead links or other problems, they’ll leave and not rank your site as high as they might have. Simple is the most effective way.

Sometimes our customers will ask us for white lettering on a dark background. We always recommend that they go with the lighter, cleaner background and darker coloured text. Your visitors eyes will thank you for this cleaner and easier to see appearance.

Now that we’ve talked about Google and your web visitors, let’s talk about you. Yes your business. After all your website needs to provide whatever your objectives are. For the most part that means getting more business. So don’t forget that you need an effective SEO strategy. Continual SEO for your web design will make it pay off.

A great website design might not be what you think. Keep it clean, keep it simple, do some SEO, and reap the benefits. Focus more on your visitor, and less on the flashy technology.

If you found this article helpful on website design please visit Murray’s website at http://www.WebTrafficSolutions.ca. You’ll get plenty more web site design tips and ideas.

Many local businesses will get a website up in attempts of attracting local customers. Having a web presence is not that much of an investment and can give your business possible notice to those locally searching for your services on the internet. Many pay money for quality web design for the site. Is this a good or bad thing?

If you have a good looking page, it can be a good thing. For one, it can make the page a bit more appealing compared to what the site originally was. There are also graphics that you can’t do on your own that you will need done by a professional. This helps since you would struggle on your own to do the same thing. Overall there is nothing wrong with quality design. There are just a few things that you need to avoid else it can become a bad thing.

First of all, don’t get ripped off. Many pay thousands of dollars for something that could be purchased elsewhere for less than one hundred dollars. At times there are free templates that look much better than many paid ones that cost hundreds of dollars, so be careful.

Another huge problem is that some sites that are designed artistically become a bit of a distraction. If the customer doesn’t know what to do on the page, it’s not a good sales tool to use for your business. Many times simple or even sloppy works better than something with a complicated design.

At other times a well designed site loads slowly. This means that what could have been a customer might become impatient and leave before seeing anything on the page.

The only way to know if a good design or a simple design is better is to actually test them and see which one gets you better results. Have a goal for your site whether it’s to get a phone call or get a lead and make that the main thing that people can do on your site.

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