8 signs you need a new website in 2018

2018 might be the best time to invest in a new website. Here are 8 reasons why you should:

1. Your site isn’t responsive.
   Your website needs to be responsive, meaning it will scale and collapse automatically to allow for optimal viewing on desktop, table and mobile devices.  Pinching and zooming are no longer considered acceptable norms of user engagement; users expect a fully optimized and responsive website they can engage with on any device, without any extra effort. Make sure your site is responsive in 2018.
    
2. Your content is out of date / hard to update. 
   If you’re unable to manage and update your website site content, you need a new website. With today’s robust CMS tools, which offer complete management of all content (text, images, documents, resources, news, events, jobs) there is no excuse for out-dated content on your site. A website is the easiest marketing tool to keep up–to- date with real time data. Make sure you employ a CMS tool that allows this.
    
3. Your site doesn’t convey your brand or is visually outdated.
   Your website is a visual representation of your brand, culture and organization. It influences how users perceive your organization, and thus your credibility and value offering. If your website design is dated it makes your company look dated, and worse, unappealing to work with. Ensure our design reflects the aesthetic you want conveyed. A design refresh in 2018 might be just what you need.
    
4. You are doing things manually.
   The web offers profound business opportunities that many companies don’t take advantage of. If you are still processing customers, lead generation/data, payments, orders, registrations and so on manually, then you are not taking advantage of the automation features offered by the web. Enabling your website to offer these features saves organizations valuable resourcing time and money. 

   This is also a huge value add to your clients by allowing them to interact with your website 24/7 on their terms. 
    

5. Your website doesn’t have a call-to-action.
   Your website must have a purpose, whether that purpose is to inform, engage, gather leads or sell goods/services. Therefore, your site should an “action” users perform to allow you to gather data, sell goods, generate revenue, collect leads, build a mailing list or whatever your objective is. Call, buy, donate, contact are examples of call to action features.
    
6. You don’t know who is visiting your site.
   It is important to track visitor information about your site: who is visiting, what pages are most popular, where the traffic is coming from, what keywords are used and so on. Employing a tool like Google Analytics is an easy way to find, track and analyze this data over time. This helps you test and validate your assumptions about your traffic and allows you to make informed business decisions based on fact.
    
7. Your content is killing you.
   A typical WORD document cannot simply be transcribed online. Content must be written for the web specifically, meaning: short, concise, impactful, up-to-date messaging. Use visually treated information to break up the text intensity of pages: full-width colour banners, image panels, graphic stats & graphs all help.  Presenting text data in a more visually appealing manner to engage AND inform the user is a key engagement tactic. Provide a link to download documents for more detailed reading at the user’s discretion to allow you to keep on-page content concise.
    
8. Your site isn’t compliant/accessible.
   Any Ontario based public company, or any Ontario based private company with 50+ employees, must have a WCAG 2.0. AA compliant website. If you fall into one of these categories you need an Accessible Compliant website, which typically implies a redesign, and possible rebuild, in order to be compliant. Note that content (imagery, text, PDFs) must also be compliant, meaning compliance has to be maintained as you add/edit/delete content ongoing.

Get Started
If you’re ready to get started, we can help. Contact us for a free consultation.

Jennifer MacKinnon
CEO | Fenix Solutions
www.fenix-solutions.com