You only have a few seconds to attract visitors to stay on your website or leave it without exploring further.

One of the reasons is that your website is loading at a snail's pace or your website is poorly designed; no one wants to glance at it again. In comparison, if your web design is awesome and the loading speed is super fast, the traffic will keep coming and keep the readers engaged.

With the ever-changing technology and trends, you need to adopt it as early as possible to avoid being barren. You might ask When Is It Time to Redesign Your Website? When everything is working perfectly and in place.

The answer lies in several factors we will discuss in this post. Before we move forward, let’s take a look at what is a website redesign.

What is a Website Redesign?

Website redesign is revamping your website by changing structure, colors, content, elements, visuals, and navigation.

The better the website redesign, the chances of increasing traffic to the website increases. Furthermore, it will help reduce the bounce rate, which is

Without further ado, let’s dive straight into why redesign your website.

Why Should I Redesign My Website?

As we mentioned earlier, designing a website depends on several factors and is not limited to poor layout or a high bounce rate.

Here are a few reasons to redesign your website.

Unresponsive Website Leads to Losing Traffic

The majority of website traffic is driven from mobile devices instead of laptops or desktops.

In the fast-paced era, everything is done on the go.

From shopping to sending emails and video conferences to doing research, you won’t bother opening your laptop to do petty tasks.

Smartphone helps you research, manage short video calls, and edit documents on the go. So if your website is unresponsive, you are losing a major chunk of traffic.

Have you ever accessed a website on your smartphone with buttons and navigation overlapping, images hovering over text, and popups that appear out of nowhere?

We assume you may have visited such a website for once.

If you want to give your visitors such an experience, don’t bother redesigning your website. However, to avoid losing traffic and poor user experience, make sure to redesign your website as early as possible.

Look at the statistics below if you are in the state of delusion.

•  According to statistics, 60.28% of website traffic is driven by mobile devices
•  Another study states 61% of users will never return to unresponsive websites.

Redesign Website to Improve Navigation

Redesigning your website is just not for the sake of improving the looks and feel of your website.

It has a lot to do with the seamless user experience and offering ease to visitors in finding pages, links, and other related elements. For instance, if a new user accesses your website for the first time, he/she might be looking for the “About Us” page to learn more about the company.

But what if the visitor has to navigate the website completely to find the desired page - would it not be frustrating for him/her? If important pages and other elements are hard to navigate, you must seriously consider redesigning your website.

Visitors come to your website for specific purposes and reasons. And if you fail to deliver what they are looking for, they might head to your competitor.

Moreover, one of the reasons to improve site navigation is that Google also finds it challenging to crawl your website. It heavily relies on the structure of your website and evaluates how it fulfills its purpose.

The easier it is to navigate your website, the better Google will crawl your web pages.

Poor Web Design Affects SEO

Several factors affect SEO and the ranking of your website.

One of them is a poor design which ultimately leads to a high bounce rate, website speed, readability, unresponsive, and poor user experience.

If your website is not getting traffic even after writing well-optimized blog posts, creating high-quality backlinks, and applying on-page SEO, you must redesign your website.

Make sure to redesign a website in such a way that is not only responsive but also a structure that helps Google and visitors to navigate with ease.

In addition, you also need to fix broken and missing elements such as 404 pages, non-functioning buttons, proper URL structure, and heavy images that take too much time to load.

Website Takes Time to Load

Website loading time will make or break your visitors.

Here’s what statistics tell about website loading time.

• 1 out of 4 visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load
• 46% of users don’t visit websites performing poorly.
• 1-second delay results in reducing 16% customer satisfaction

 It is believed that the attention span of the human brain is about 8 seconds.

Whether it be images, text, or videos, you can never grab visitors' attention if the time is wasted in loading.

They might head to some other websites loading faster and prefer purchasing from them.

A slow website leads to poor user experience, and one of the reasons for slow site speed is the non-optimization of images. Make sure when redesigning your website, to start optimizing images from the beginning. Also, optimize your images when you put fresh content on your website.

And if you want to display a video on your website, upload it on a third-party website like YouTube and embed the code on it.

You must be vigilant about not leaving blank spaces or extra code when redesigning your website.

After you have redesigned your website, head on to Google PageSpeed Insights to check the speed.

Enter the URL of your website, and if the results are under 3 seconds, you have successfully achieved your goal.

Remember, website speed is one of the biggest Google ranking factors.

Don’t miss the opportunity and redesign your website to make it load faster.

Low Conversions

Up till now, you have learned much about when to redesign your website.

But what if everything on your website is perfect according to the scenarios discussed above, but there is a low conversion on your website?

For instance, Google Analytics shows visitors coming to your website, but the conversion rate is zero or negligible.

Visitors come to your website for a reason, and if they don’t take the desired action, there might be some reason behind it.

That is where redesigning becomes necessary and why good web design should be part of your marketing strategy.

When redesigning your website, put yourself in the shoes of visitors.

The best approach is to make use of Heat Maps to know the behavior of visitors on your website.

With the help of heat maps, you can;

•  Analyze major issues on the website not leading to conversion
•   Help you redesign a better website by learning the behavior of users on the website
•  Allow you to design a better website by placing a call to action in the right place
•  Heat Maps allow making decisions that drive business results.
• Heat Maps also help you do A/B testing of your website to know which variant performs better

Rebranding Your Website

Do you find inconsistency in your design across pages, or you want to rebrand your website from scratch (logos, banners, taglines, mission, and vision)

If you have an inconsistent look and feel on different website sections, you must fix it as early as possible.

Visitors might get confused if they are redirected to another website or some malicious page.

Design inconsistencies are commonly found on websites that have scaled up over the years.

If your website is also one of them, you must implement brand styles and guidelines to give your site a unified look.

It includes fonts, icons, color palettes, button styles, and more.

One of example of website redesigning is MailChimp, which completely changed in 2018.

The email marketing website was redesigned by adding a new logo, changing the brand color, and including a stylish serif typeface.  

If you are considering rebranding your website from scratch, just like MailChimp did, redesign your website now. 

Your Website is Rich on Text

Have you ever visited a website with all text and no visuals?

Wasn’t it looking outdated and muddled, leaving no clue what it is all about and how to navigate to different sections?

Plus, the strain it had on your eyes. 

If your website is also one of its types, it’s time to consider redesigning your website.

We live in a world where videos, images, and infographics are highly impactful, especially when taking action.

Rich text websites are not easy on the eyes, and getting lost in the buzz of words would be normal for any visitor.

Moreover, without including graphics would result in misreading the text.

One of the reasons to revamp your rich text website is that visitors might find it challenging to find call-to-action buttons.

For instance, it may block visitors from clicking the button to purchase a product, fill out the form to receive freebies, or download an eBook to learn more about your product/service.

No matter what action you wish your visitors to take, it may take longer on a rich-text website compared to a graphic website.

As mentioned earlier, the average attention span is 8 seconds.

Make sure to grab the attention as soon as the visitors access your website and help them to take the desired action.

Adding Functionality to Your Website

Your website should be easy to navigate, user-friendly, and easy to understand.

As time passes, your website traffic grows, and you need to scale it up by adding extra features and functionalities.

For instance, if you want to add content in different languages or integrate a chatbot for better customer support, you need to redesign your website to make it easy for visitors to navigate.

Updating Your Website is Hard

In today’s digital age, you need to keep your website fresh and updated with content.

At least if you are solely relying on organic traffic, updating blogs and resources should be a breeze.

However, if you find it difficult to update your website frequently, you need to redesign it with a professional web design agency without further waiting.

Some of the popular Content Management Systems like WordPress have made it easier to update the website frequently.

You need to make things easier by shifting to a content management system and designing it according to your requirements.

Or simply let your developers and designers take charge and make it easier for everyone to update content from the backend

How Often to Redesign Website?

The question how often should you redesign your website might be mocking you because it takes loads of effort, time, and money to revamp it.

It is not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking, redesigning your website should be done at least after every two to three years.

The reason is that most of the design trends change over time and need to be updated to stay competitive.

In addition, many website elements like images, content, videos, buttons, call to action, colors, and branding must be changed over time.

Staying competitive and up to the standards of Google as well as visitors/customers is why website redesigning must be done after every two to three years.

When Is It Time to Redesign Your Website? Final Thoughts

In this post, we have discussed what website redesigning is, why redesign your website, and how often to redesign your website.

Don’t be reluctant to take a step toward redesigning your website.

Yes, it indeed requires a lot of time, effort, and money, but the output is fruitful.

But website redesigning will have a huge impact in terms of revenue, traffic, and building credibility among the target audience.

You can also find plenty of tools online to evaluate your website’s design and give recommendations.

Once you have redesigned your website, it is important to check the performance of your website regularly.

Not only will it help in improving traffic and rankings, but it will also save you money from fixing the issues and resolving problems. 

If you're a business that has decided to go online, you must need a well-designed website. And for your website, it is best to hire a professional web design agency. Why go through so much trouble on your own when you have experts to take care of the job, right! 😉

But do you know how to choose your web design agency?

This is quite an important decision to make because a website is your business's and brand's online face. It is a one-stop destination for your customers to know more about you and your business. A user-friendly and informative website makes an everlasting impression of your brand. We’re sure now you understand the significance of knowing how to choose your web design agency.

In this article, we will furnish you with practical tips on the different things you should keep in mind on how to pick your web design agency.

Aligning Your Business And Website Goals

No one knows your business more than you do. Your desired website design depends upon the nature of your business,  whether you are an e-commerce business, business-to-business seller, or service-intensive business. An agency specializing in your relevant business area will be ideal for meeting your business objectives.

You must also be very clear about what goals you want to achieve through your website and how they should be aligned with your broad business goals. Thus, you should list your website requirements and translate those into SMART goals.

Some of your website  goals can be:

• Generating sales leads for your  business
• Syncing with your CRM software such as Salesforce or HubSpot,
• Integrating with your automated marketing system  like Pardot, Marketo, or HubSpot
• Linking with your email marketing tools such as Constant Contact or MailChimp
• Taking subscription-based payments or donations;
• Collecting user information directly on your site through an online form;

Your website must have a few  specific features  to achieve the goals mentioned above:

• User-friendly interface and search-engine-optimized information
• Ecommerce utility
• Secure online forms
• An SSL certificate
• HTTPs protocol

Documenting your goals and website requirements helps in how to choose your web design agency. You may interview a few of them to find the best match for your business and website goals.

Finding An Array Of Services

It would be best to look for an agency that offers an array of inter-related services to save you time and hassle. Services that you may require include product photography, copywriting, digital marketing, email handling, and social media management. This way, you will deal with a single web design agency instead of multiple ones.

Budget And Timeline

Budget is an important constraint that affects how you choose your web design agency. You must know and mention your expected price range to get realistic price quotes from potential web design partners. Timeline is also a key factor that you should consider. If you want to see your website live immediately, you must look for a currently available agency.

Relevant Industry Experience

Now that you know your goals, budget, and timeline, you have covered the basics of how to choose your web design agency. What’s next? Start looking for a web design partner with relevant experience in your specific industry. You can search some on Google, ask industry gurus or search local directories to find the best web design agency.

Three important parameters that help you choose your web design agency are the following:

• Experience
• Organizational culture
• Previous work portfolio

You will get an insight into your expectations and results by looking at these three. It will be easier to judge whether they can meet your goals and fulfill your requirements.

Let's look at each of these to have a better understanding of how to choose your web design agency.

Experience

Experience refers to how long they have been working as an agency and do they have previously worked in your relevant industry. An experienced web design agency has well-developed processes, a competent team, and the highest service quality standards.

Website design is not a one-time job. You will require ongoing support for your website once it goes live. An agency partner offering complimentary marketing services to raise your business should be your preference.

Portfolio

How you choose your web design agency depends greatly on their existing portfolio. A portfolio is the best tool to evaluate the skills and competence of any agency. Most web design companies have a separate portfolio section on their website.

But before you go through their portfolio, you must pay attention to assess their own website. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate, and fully informational website speaks volumes about its agency's capability to handle your project.

While reviewing the websites they have already delivered to clients, you must keep these questions in mind.

• Are the websites professional-looking and user-friendly?
• Do their featured clients have the same size as your business?
• Do the sites have similar functionality to what you are looking for in your website?
• Have they made mobile-friendly websites?
• Are all the websites have a similar design in terms of arrangement, navigation, content, and imagery?
• Have they received any awards for their website?

If you like an agency's portfolio but do not have any experience in your industry, you may ask them whether they can meet your requirements.

Organizational Culture

An agency's culture plays a key role in determining how you choose the web design agency. You must know the people you choose to work with. It would be best to look for an agency whose culture is similar to your organization's culture. This way, you have better communication and collaboration throughout the web design process.

A few of the questions that you should consider are:

1. Do they appreciate their team's talent and skills?
2. Do they have a  welcoming environment?
3. Do they consider your ideas?
4. Do they feel excited about your website?

You must also look for if your chosen agency has international exposure and experience. It is a plus point if they have. Another important question is: do they have an in-house marketing department? A web design agency with a designated marketing team brings specialized knowledge and fresh ideas for your project.

Testimonials & Online Reviews

Testimonials and online reviews are great sources to give information about a particular web design agency. The reviews give insight into how many happy customers they have, how good is their customer service and how they treat their employees.

It is not difficult nowadays to find online reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp. You can also see testimonials on their own website that help you in choosing your web design agency.

Questions To Ask From Your Potential Web Design Agency

Do prepare a list of questions to ask your potential web design agency before you hire them. We have compiled a list of these questions to help you choose your web design partner.

1. What services do you offer other than web design?

An agency that offers multiple services should be your first choice.

2. Do you have proper research about our business?

If your web agency knows well about your business and your clients, they will do a better job.

3. Can you design a website in my budget range?

You must communicate your budget beforehand to avoid any misunderstanding afterward.

4. Will I have a designated project manager to contact?

You must know who will be the person responsible for communicating with you.

5. What is your design process?

You should see the design process flow chart and SOPs of your potential web agency.

6. Which content management system do you use?

A CMS allows you to update, edit and manage website content on your own. The most popular CMS are WordPress, Joomla, SquareSpace, etc.

7. Are your web designs responsive?

A responsive website is one whose design adjusts according to the screen size of the device, be it desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile. This is quite a substantial factor to analyze when deciding how to choose your web design agency.

8. Do you have a quality assurance team?

The quality assurance team ensures that the design process is smooth and your requirements are truly met.

9. What kind of after-sales services will you provide after the website launch?

You will need the ongoing support of your web design agency even after it goes live.

10. Will you provide training to my team?

Your web design agency should provide one-to-one training sessions, website lessons, and video tutorials to IT experts of your business.

The decision of how to choose your web design agency cannot be taken all of a sudden. It is essential to spend enough time searching and shortlisting potential web design firms for your business. Your website makes the first impression on potential customers of your brand and business. Thus the time and effort you spend finding an ideal fit for your business needs are worth it.

The more due diligence you do before signing your contract, the happier you will be with your decision. Your satisfaction greatly depends on your relationship with your agency, the entire web design procedure, and the outcome of your project after completion.

Always remember that a good-looking website is not the only thing you are looking for. A website that isn't easy to use will not generate traffic and sales for your business. Do keep in mind all the different elements we discussed in this article regarding how to choose your web design agency, and you’ll surely find a good one. While we are on that topic, Tom & Co is quite an expert in that area.

 

Many small business owners often make the mistake of overlooking business cybersecurity, thinking they are not at risk due to their relatively small size. However, reports from the Better Business Bureau shows that there is an annual loss of $80,000 due to negligence from business owner.

As a business owner, you’re just at risk of cyber attacks as giant businesses. Without proper security measures, you’re risking your customers' data to attackers. These data could be credit cards information, names, and addresses.

It is important to tighten security irrespective of how small your business is. By making cybersecurity a top priority, you save yourself from the hassles that come with a security breach. So, here are some of the ways to improve your small business cybersecurity.

1. Change your passwords

You will be shocked to learn that your email accounts have been illegally accessed and released to the public domain. The least you can do to avert the worst from happening is to change your passwords.

Data breaches are rampant, and a simple thing such as changing your passwords could be all you need to protect your business.

2. Use a trusted password manager

To up your password game, you should consider using a password manager with a track record of trust. There are some tools you can consider, like Sticky Password, Dashland, and LastPass. With these tools, you don’t need to stress yourself when it comes to keeping track of your passwords.

They offer the same benefits of regularly changing your passwords, without having to make it hard for your employees. If you ever need someone to access your accounts, these tools can help you share passwords sets.

3. Turn on two-factor authentication

To add an extra layer of security to your accounts, you need to enable two-factor authentication. It isn't a techy process since it is as easy as registering a new phone number or installing an app. With this feature, you make it pretty hard for attackers to gain access to your accounts.

4. Always update your software

Software updates sometimes come with security patches that help protect your small business from detected vulnerabilities. Attackers are always out to explore vulnerabilities, while your software companies are always on the lookout to detect and prevent you from being bugged.

5. Have a backup

In the event of an attack that might lead to data loss, having a backup can be what determine if you go out of business or not. With a reliable backup in place, viruses or other infections will not be the end of your business as you can always restore and be running in no time.

If this sounds like hard work, perhaps your best bet is to work with an expert who understands the needs of your business. Feel free to give us a call or fill our contact form.

SEO, which is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is a very critical element in marketing. It involves employing strategic efforts to make a website more visible on internet search engines like Google. 

SEO has evolved into an indispensable aspect in digital marketing, which every organization, whether small or big, must adopt if they must stay ahead of competitors and remain sustainable in the current economic system. 

Although it sometimes appears difficult or elusive due to the frequent changes in search engine algorithms. Still, the good thing is that the basic rules remain the same and are very easy to understand and follow. 

The tips outlined below provide effective SEO strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve and emerge victoriously.

1. Know your keywords

Perfect knowledge of your keywords shows you which words people are searching for, and when these words are in your titles, you have a high chance of ranking on Google's SERP. This calls for a lot of research and hard work because it is the most crucial if you must get your target audience on board.

2. Create high-Quality content

The key to winning the hearts of users is posting content that resonates with them. Dishing out valued, trusted, and high-quality information should be your purpose. Always employ the services of good content creators who can do a perfect job for a bit of cost because, generally, where each customer loves to visit is where they would find enough information and high-quality content.

3. Use keywords in your website page URLs

Always use relevant keywords when creating URLs for your content. It is best to go for the highly-rated terms, which everyone Is looking for to help you beat the algorithm in your favour.

Apps like Google Ads Keyword Planner or google trends can help you uncover keywords worth going after. So instead of using complex or choice words, use relevant terms that will channel traffic unto your favour.

4. Use attractive page titles, images, and videos

You rank better in SERP when you include elements like images, videos, academics, news, and trending economic issues in your content. It might interest you to know that SEO often targets unpaid traffic (i.e., natural results from a search engine) rather than direct searches or paid traffic. 

This formula beats the working setup of any search engine because once the algorithm from your webpage rhymes with the data on demand, your webpage will be flooded with visitors coming to view and interact with your web page, making a lot of income for yourself and adding value to your website.

As the search engine algorithms continue to be dynamic with more advanced technologies, the SEO principles remain the same. If that sounds like a lot of work, you're not alone. That's why most organisations and individuals hire experts to handle their site's SEO. Go ahead and give us a call, or perhaps fill the contact form to begin.

Negative SEO is a sneaky move where a company or business owner tries to steal the rankings of other businesses by using their keywords so that their competitors' sites won't pop up when a person searches for information concerning their business.

It is the process of hijacking other sites to get them penalized or bringing them to ruin.

There are different forms of negative SEO, such as bad reviews, aimed at tearing down companies or businesses, duplicating content and putting them on numerous sites, hacking into sites, and much more.

So, how do you protect your business from these malicious attacks?

Monitor Your Backlinks

Backlinks are links in pages other than your business page that lead to your connection. For example, when you browse the best stores in your neighborhood, that page is likely to have links that lead to each store's private page; those are backlinks.

Most times, your site is attacked by negative SEO when they create weak or lousy quality links leading to your site, or they make redirects. While these redirects and links are forming, you may be unaware of it, which is very dangerous to your business site; you need to be aware of the links that direct to your website.

You can use online tools to check your backlinks daily, and some send information about the activities revolving around your backlinks directly to your inbox.

Shield Your Most Effective Backlinks

Your attackers carry out a successful negative SEO attack when they eliminate your most effective backlinks. They do this by impersonating you and informing the webmaster of that backlink to delete it. To prevent this from happening, you should monitor your backlinks using online tools.

Another preventive measure is to constantly communicate with the webmaster using an email address with your domain; instead of using any of the email apps, use an email with your domain on it so the webmaster can distinguish your messages from ones sent by imposters.

Secure Your Site From Hackers 

Hackers slip into an insecure or poorly-secured website easily and wreak havoc while you watch helplessly. To prevent that from happening, you need to secure your website from spammers and hackers by:

• Creating a strong password, mixing in numbers and special keys.
• Make sure you have a backup for all your files and the entire database. Make sure you create backups every day.

Look For Replicas On The Internet

Duplicating your content all over the internet is a way to get your search engine's attention and a way to get your site taken down. It would be best if you were wary of duplications. Various sites help you detect repeated content coming from your site to be on track and combat negative SEO.

If you believe you’ve been a victim of negative SEO, do well to contact an expert by calling or filling our contact form. We’ll ensure that every bad SEO targeted at your business website is rendered void and null, without you having to break the bank.

A blue collar job is one that is considered the more common hourly wage position in the work force. For decades, blue collar jobs were in construction, manufacturing, maintenance, retail, and other professions where their labor force dominated the employment environment. But as the United States watches its economy transition from manufacturing to information, some people are starting to wonder if website coding is becoming the next blue collar job.

The Growth Of Website Coders

The blue collar workforce does what is considered the daily grind work for the entire economy. These are people who are respected for "packing a lunch" and "doing a hard day's work." It is estimated that the web coding workforce will grow 15 percent between 2016 and 2026, which is faster than any other occupation in the United States. That will put the total number of website coders in the United States at around 190,000 by 2026, and that is a big percentage of the workforce.

Doing The Grind Work

One of the big reasons for the growth in website coding positions is the rapid growth in mobile computing. It is estimated that in 2017 the percentage of people accessing the Internet through their phones was 50 percent. That number steadily grows year after year, and that is fueling the need for more mobile websites. As the number of people accessing the Internet through smartphones grows, so will the number of website coders.

Specialists

Just like construction companies have engineers who run the cranes and plumbers, the blue collar website coding workforce also has its specialists. Website coding requires experts in ecommerce, security, data gathering, language translation, and a variety of other fields that are all essential in keeping the Internet going. These are the people who are making website coding into blue collar work, and their numbers keep growing.

High Pay

One of the reasons blue collar work was so popular during the industrial revolution and beyond is because it offered high pay to people who had limited educations. Anyone with an aptitude for computers can learn to code, but the median pay in 2017 was $67,990.00 per year, which is a pay rate similar to that of the other blue collar positions.

The Big Difference

The biggest difference between website coders and other blue collar workers is that coders need a college degree of some kind to attract clients. Construction workers can rise through the ranks from the laborer position and get the specific training they need to get promoted. But most customers expect their website coders to be college educated, which is not something that is required of the other blue collar positions.

As the website coder workforce grows, so does its prominence in the American economy. One of the reasons website coding attracts so many workers is that it can be a high-paying job that can be done from home. A large number of coders work for companies as remote offices, and the ability to work from home is causing a lot of people to start taking up website coding.

With the new economy comes the new types of grinding jobs that are done for hours every day by a dedicated workforce. The website coder is quickly becoming part of the blue collar workforce, and there is a chance that coders could be the premier blue collar workers in the not-too-distant future.