There comes a time for every business to assess the need for a new website.  Whether it’s a new site entirely or just making changes to your current one, it can be a stressful and long-winded process.  The traditional web design process comes with pressure.  It needs to be perfect, or else you’re stuck with an underperforming site for the next few years.  Let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as a perfect website.  The digital business landscape is constantly changing, and the static web design process needs to get with the times.  Here are a few reasons why this approach is broken, and won’t deliver the promising results you need.

1. The only constant is change

Especially in business, the only thing that constantly remains the same is that nothing ever stays the same.  Everything is always changing and as businesses we need to remain agile to adapt and survive.  Building a website, setting it live, and simply seeing how it does is not only lazy, but extremely ineffective. 

It might be great and produce the results you want for the next 6 months, but chances are there will be an update to search engines, customer preferences, or behavioral trends that will render your expensive new site, outdated.  The days of “setting and forgetting” are coming to an end. 

Consumers expect a speedy and relevant experience when they arrive at your site, regardless of what device they’re using.  The traditional website redesign process fails to recognize the endless cycle of change in the marketplace.  When companies stick to this approach, they’ll be looking for another redesign every few years, shelling out thousands of dollars that could effectively spent elsewhere.  

To stay up to date with the ever changing digital landscape, here are a few of the latest web design trends. 

2. Even Ferraris require maintenance

Who doesn’t like a good car analogy?  Regardless of whatever luxury car you’d love to see yourself driving, if you want to keep turning heads you need to take care of it.  All the non-luxurious aspects of upkeep that allow you to ride in style is what maintains your image, status, and reputation.  It’s simple, if you don’t actively maintain your ride, it’s just a matter of time before it stops working.

Just like your dream sports car, a website without proper maintenance will soon putter out and lose all it’s magic.  It’s important to start any design project with a clearly defined goal for the website.  This way, you’ll know what to measure along the way, make improvements, and crush the goal you’ve set for the business.

Your website is your biggest piece of digital content.  People are constantly interacting with and evaluating your business based on its aesthetic and even more so on its functionality.  Making changes to your site every couple years is a quick way to plateau and push your goals out of reach.

3. A Quick Geometry review…

To this day, one thing has stuck with me from my agonizing junior high geometry class (other than the insane number of pointless triangles I drew).  The shortest distance between any 2 points is a straight line.  Essentially, if you want to get from point A to point B, make the route as direct as possible.

So how does this apply to the website redesign process?  As you can see in the graphic, the traditional process has long periods of flat steps that eventually get to your goal.  However, when you break up the steps into smaller increments that are actively working towards reaching point B, you get there much faster, and can focus on getting to point C, D, and wherever else you have plans for. 

When you give your development team the task of building a new site, they’ll disappear for a little while and come back with what you asked for.  Depending on how long it took them, certain aspects of the coding might not be up to date or even trendy anymore.  Already your new site is behind.

When you shift towards an active, data driven design approach you’ll be able to stay on top of the development process while it’s happening.  You’ll be able to adapt to user behavior and ensure you achieve your business goals.  Not only this, but it will happen in real time, and a lot more efficiently than setting it live and hoping you see the results you want. 

Don’t worry…There’s a better way

As a marketing and web design agency, we see businesses struggle with this problem all the time.  They’ll allocate a huge budget to a new site, set it live, and forget about it.  Regardless of how fantastic the site was, it’s inevitable that at some point elements will become irrelevant and hinder the site’s ability to perform.  This is why ongoing analysis and maintenance is critical to having a consistently high performing website.

If you’re looking for a new website or a website redesign, contact us.  We can help you define a strategy, set goals, and work alongside with your team to turn your ideas into a growth driven reality.