Spring cleaning your website might seem like a funny concept. There’s nothing to dust, vacuum or replace.
Okay, so maybe the dusting and vacuuming isn’t applicable to your website, but the whole idea of getting rid of the old to bring in the new definitely is!
The direction, character and aims of your business will change over time, in the same way that your design taste will change and become more refined as you get older.
Not to mention, the digital sphere is a fast-moving one. What works today might be completely outdated in a year or so!
Hence, the importance of the occasional spring clean for your business website. This is essential if you want to develop an effective online marketing strategy (just as much as your home needs a Spring clean to keep it fresh and up to date).
As your company grows and takes on more and more responsibility, you may find that you want to project a more corporate, highly professional image.
Alternatively, your company may have taken an ‘all business’ approach at the beginning and gradually settled into a more casual, softer image.
Either way, your business has changed – and your website needs to keep up!
This is exactly why your business website needs a Spring clean. The design and content of your website needs to match the character of your business.
The best way to achieve this is with a professional online marketing team to guide you.
Revamp your web design
The way your website looks is incredibly important.
The colour pattern, the images and even the font communicate ideas and tones to potential customers that they aren’t even consciously aware they are picking up on.
We aren’t making this up either – there’s a wealth of research that confirms how we’re subliminally influenced by the little details.
Before a customer reads any of your content, they are going to quickly scan over a few basic elements:
- Photos. You know what they say, a picture says a thousand words!
- Headings. How headings and titles are worded play a huge role in making a good first impression
- Colour pallette. Colour pallette can convey tone and feeling.
- Navigation bar. Headings and a navigation bar will refine your products or services, and help visitors identify your niche.
If a visitor to your website likes what they see in their initial browse of the site, they are much more likely to keep reading and find out more about you. Therefore, you need to make sure that what they see looks fantastic!
And finally, people’s taste changes over time. Just take a look at the website for 1996 movie Space Jam – while we’re sure it was a fantastic website at the time, nowadays it just looks amateurish.
Put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has never experienced this piece of classic cinema. Would you watch it based solely off its website? Of course not!
You need to create a clear strategy for your website design in order to convey the correct message through these elements.
Luckily, an online marketing agency will be able to help you in this regard.
Our professional team at iformat can ensure that your website design makes an impact, while remaining professional and credible.
In addition to creating a site that’s aesthetically-pleasing, we also redesign websites with an eye towards making conversions. We know what layouts and formats generate the best response, and build sites with that in mind.
Get rid of technical issues
Nobody likes a site that takes forever to load. In fact, according to some in the SEO industry, every additional second of loading can decrease conversions by 7 percent!
As such, it’s crucial that you resolve any issues that may be slowing your site down during your spring clean.
The possible causes are many, and highly-technical in nature, so we won’t have time to go over all of them. However, there are a couple of culprits we see time and time again:
- Slow hosting
- Database and caching issues
- Images that are too large
- Messy scripting
- Resource-intensive plugins like Flash
During your website spring clean, you’ll also want to do a technical audit to ensure that each of these issues is caught early on.
Think about your content
Old, low-resolution photos. A company profile that hasn’t been updated in years. Web pages for products or services you no longer offer. All of this has to go if you want your website to perform!
Old content that obviously hasn’t been updated in a while is a bad look – simple as that. Think back to the Space Jam example we mentioned above.
Not to mention, it can also create confusion if your content makes reference to services you don’t offer anymore!
However, these aren’t the only reasons to update your content…
Create a content strategy
Is your last website update a couple of years old or more?
Is your blog or news section a ghost town?
Do you struggle to find to come up with interesting blog ideas that generate leads?
We’ll let you in on a little secret: that might be the reason nobody can find your website on Google!
When it comes to SEO, a steady stream of high-quality, original content is essential, whether that’s website updates or a regular blog.
This isn’t something you can just “wing”. For the best results, you need to create a blog strategy that manages to do the following things:
- Inspires action
- Solves visitors’ problems
- Remain positive
- Creates interest (without dawdling)
A good blog strategy will draw clients to your website and convince them of the credibility, reliability and efficiency of the product or service that you provide.
And most importantly, it’s created with an eye towards generate leads for your pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO).
If you want to really master your blog content, read up on f-pattern reading to find out how to tailor your content to a population that scans more and reads less.
Alternatively, you can get caught up by checking out our blog (wink, wink). We’ve talked at length about the intricacies of creating a content strategy, as well as executing on it.
When you trust iformat to take care of all your content marketing Melbourne needs, our professional team can incorporate all these things and more into your blog content.
Work with iformat to secure quality content marketing
So there you have it: all the fundamentals of a website spring clean.
Of course, this is only a high-level discussion – if we were to get into the nitty-gritty, we’d be here for literal hours. And we’re pretty sure you don’t have time for that!
So you want to spring clean your website. Unfortunately, you haven’t the foggiest clue where to start.
Enter, iformat.
We won’t just clean up your websites – our professional online content marketers can help to transform your website into a 24 hour sales team.
We offer value. Value for your money, increased value in your online presence and valuable marketing advice.
With experts in a range of online marketing strategies, our team can boost your ranking on Google and generate more leads:
- Content marketing and strategy
- Search engine optimisation
- Social media strategy
- Conversion strategy
We can also help improve the loading and response times of your website, as well as it mobile compatibility in order to further generate leads for your business.
Eager for more leads, calls, quotes and jobs? Talk to iformat today – you can request a call or call us on 1300 88 64 50.