Three Reasons Why You Need a New Website

If your website's content is outdated, you may be sending a signal to potential customers that you are no longer in business. Staying current goes beyond your content, however; the look and feel of your site speak to whether your business can provide solutions to today's problems.

Old Content

You know who you are. Your business hasn't opened on a Sunday in 5 years but your site still says otherwise. Here are some other common violations:

• Displays old branding/logo
• Does not have your current contact information
• Lists inaccurate hours of operation
• Contains expired product and service offerings
• Promotes past events

Your website should serve as a gateway to your business, but allowing your website's content to lapse can frustrate your customers before they ever even walk through your door!

Stale Design

Web design is about more than simply following trends. Ten years ago, most people still accessed the internet via PC. Today, most people connect to the web on a variety of (primarily mobile) devices and screen sizes. The reality is, your website may not look good on all screens.

Your website likely needs a facelift if:

• It doesn't look good across all screen sizes
• It pops up with a request for the user's email address moments after the page loads, blocking all other content
• The average user can't quickly locate important information
• Navgation menus are overcomplicated or contain too many links
• It reminds you of a simpler time
• You don't like how it looks

Your website should represent who you are as a business and reflect your personality. Make a good first impression with a super slick site.

Your website is considered inaccessible if the user experience is diminished because of a user's disability. usability.gov asserts that:

More about Accessibility

Serious web developers will adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines are meant to advocate on behalf of users with disabilities. For the lay person, I recommend looking over this video by Google.

Here are some things you may not have previously considered:

• Choose a sufficiently-high contrast ratio between text and backgrounds for people with visual disabilities such as color blindness. Tools like coolors.co can quantify this for you.
• Ensure transcripts are available for audio recordings such as podcasts for people with hearing disabilities
• Provide captions for video content for people with hearing disabilities
• Structure forms such that they can be navigated via keyboard or voice assistant for people with impaired motor skills
• Layout your content in a logical way (using semantic HTML) so that it is accessible via screen readers
• Add descriptive alternative text to images so that they can be "seen" by screen readers

It's not Always Obvious

If I may get personal for just a moment, while it may be obvious that some users are blind or deaf, you may not have all your bases covered.

As an example, I have ADHD; even the slightest, seemingly-meaningless distraction can derail me, so I have to work extra hard to stay focused and on task. Even as I am writing this, my 3 year-old is running around with what must be an endless supply of energy, and I have to keep redirecting myself back to the task at hand.

If I visit a website that is poorly structured and has way too much going on, requiring excessive cognitive effort to find what I'm looking for, I will probably just leave and go somewhere else. I don't like being distracted unnecessarily; my brain does that for me all day long. Oh, and dark mode is a gift from God.

In addition to cognitive disabilities like ADHD, your users could have physical disabilities that impair their ability to easily control the movement of a mouse. For example, if you have an order form on your site, users should be able to complete it easily via keyboard or their device's voice assistant to avoid adding physical and emotional strain to their customer experience.

I'm sure you're not using the same phone you were five years ago. Our phones are faster, bigger, brighter, and smarter.

Much like your phone, your website does not need an upgrade every year, but it ages very quickly. Newer web standards call for faster websites that can load quickly even when a user is on a slow network; it makes sense, given that most people access the internet on mobile devices.

Can you answer yes to any of the following?

• Does your website take a long time to load on an average cellular connection? – Does it take a long time to load on a bad network connection?
• Does your site load multiple fonts?
• Does your site have tons of images?
• Does your site have any videos?
• Does it take a long time for users to submit forms or other interactive content?

You shouldn't settle for a slow website. You see, in today's world of web development, we can have our cake and eat it, too. We can design and develop super cool and interactive sites while following modern standards of performance, such as only loading resources in the browser when the user actually needs them, and better ways of compressing video and audio.

If you're still not convinced that your site is slow, go over to Google's Page Speed Insights tool and enter your url. This tool simulates a mobile device on a 3G connection and will return a score between 0 and 100. You should aim for a score of 90 or higher.

Thanks for reading this article.

If you have seen the light and are ready for a new website, shoot me an email at hi@ulises.codes.