Microsoft Website Circa 2008
Do you wear the same things that you wore 10 years ago?
The answer is probably not because, the fact is, that fashions change. Not just in clothes or movies of TV programmes; fashions change in website design too; and changes in the online world tend to happen a lot faster than in the offline one. To give an example, I came across this interesting site to show how some popular websites have evolved over the years.
But the change is not just down to fashion. With web design, technology plays a largepart. For example, as connection speeds and computer speeds increase it becomes possible to design more technically complex sites. Sites with high resolution images, audio and video are now commonplace because of these technological advances.
What this boils down to for businesses is that a website that was designed a few, even as little as 2, years ago is more than likely to look old fashioned by today’s standards. The equivalent of wearing flares and platform shoes, to use an extreme analogy. And would you take someone who dresses like this seriously? At best you think them a bit odd. At worst you’d think they had lost it. That’s exactly what people will be thinking about your business if your website hasn’t been updated for years.
I’m not talking about redesigning your site every 2 or 3 years. I’m talking about evolution not revolution; small changes to keep pace with changes in technology and fashion, because if cost is an issue (and it is for most small businesses), small evolutionary updates needn’t cost a great deal of money. Going back to the site that I referred to above, you can see that some of these sites have done just that – evolved.
So my question to you is, when was your website design last updated and does it make your business look like a 1970’s fashion icon?
