Dancing Bologna - Time to Redesign your Website
When consumers search the web for products and services, they often make purchasing decisions on how a website feels. If your site hasn’t changed in the past six years, chances are, consumers are passing it by to search for a company who has an active web presence - even if it ranks very well on Google or Yahoo!
That's not to say that every site needs to flaunt the latest technology. Not every company needs to use AJAX or Ruby on Rails. But if your website features more than two of the signs listed below, it is long-past time reevaluate how to intergrate the Internet into your business. Once you do, you might find that your site becomes a healthy source of new customers.
- Hit counters – A staple of any site designed in 1998. Do you really want your visitor to know they are number 1725?
- Under construction road signs – If it has been under construction since 1997 it probably is never going to get done.
- Best Viewed With / Optimized for I.E. 4.0 – This is only a half step better than a copyright date that is five years ago.
- Huge splash pages with flash animations – No one wants to watch you commercial before they get to your site. Many will back out before it even finishes loading.
- Cheap midi music - Please don’t hijack your visitor’s speakers with your music. This might be the fastest way to get someone to hit the back button.
- Smileys – They may have been popular back when you had an AOL account but we have all grown up a little since then.
- A flashing marquee that scrolls across the page – Another animated GIF mistake. It reeks of an old site.
- Guestbooks – A playground for spammers to link to their site.
- Multiple fonts – Don’t make your website look like a ransom note. Pick a font and stick to it.
- Dancing bologna – This describes superfluous and garish web design elements that marketing departments love, but the average customer will ultimately loathe.
If you are guilty of any of these infractions of good taste the Web Design Deli can put you in touch with four local developers to help bring your website into the 21st century.