10 signs your website needs a design refresh
You’re settling into your Monday morning tasks, delicious freshly-brewed coffee by your side, an optimistic view of the week ahead, and the sun cascading delicately through the slats of your newly installed Venetian blind. ‘Plink’ — a calendar notification pops up and reminds you of your 10am meeting. ‘Internal: Website refresh chat’. Oh, no!
We absolutely love talking to our clients about their websites, and we love designing them and building them too. A website refresh is a superb opportunity for a business to not only press ‘reset’ on your content and messaging, but a great time to rethink how your brand identity translates into a web presence.
However, not everybody holds the same boundless enthusiasm when it comes to websites. We completely understand that for many businesses, the looming prospect of having to update your tired, old and slow website often falls to the bottom of the priority list. For many organisations, it can be internal bottlenecks, conflicting opinions, or having to work with an agency you perhaps don’t see
eye-to-eye with.
As an agency, we work hard to not only build brilliant websites, but to build the right relationship around it too. Check out our recent blog on client feedback to see what they really think of us.
For us, the buzz is around taking our clients on a journey. Unearthing their values, unleashing their own creativity, and discovering new ways to express themselves as a brand. Of course, the output is purely digital, but the by product is a client who walks away with a shiny new website and a new favourite agency.
Sometimes it pays to just take a deep breath and admit that it’s time to push the button on a new site. Your customers will thank you, your prospects will notice you, and your team will be proud of you. So without further ado, here are 10 signs that your website is in need of a refresh. By a brilliant branding agency. You know, like us.
1. Accessibility issues – users or customers are telling you they can’t find things
Perhaps you’re getting an increasing number of enquiries around a certain piece of information that should be on your website. Or customers are abandoning a particular process such as sign-up, cart or registration.
A website refresh is a good opportunity to map out these individual customer journeys and uncover pain points like this. A combination of analytics up-front and user testing before launch will help you to validate these assumptions.
2. Your bounce rate is too high — generally over 60% is cause for concern
Your bounce rate is essentially how quickly your users ‘bounce’ off your website. Typically, this is caused by a visitor not finding any relevance in your content or as in the previous point, not being able to find what they’re looking for in good time.
There are strategies for reducing bounce rates, ranging from page load time to navigation. Even high word count and poor design can contribute to users giving up on a website. Thankfully, all the factors that you need to consider when reducing your bounce rate are all things that we specialise in.
3. Your website and your brand identity are misaligned
You rebranded in 2020, but you still haven’t updated your website. It happens! Sadly, it’s not simply a case of uploading the new logo and changing some colours. A rebranding project should include a plan to update your online presence too, but we understand why this may not have happened.
Aligning your website with your identity garners trust from your customers. It brings consistency to your brand, and it will also help with point 2 — reducing bounce rate. If a user clicks through to your website from a beautifully designed social graphic or banner ad, only to land on a tired old webpage, they may well click away in disappointment.
4. You’re losing potential customers to your competitors
Customers can be fickle beings! Brand can be everything when it comes to a user choosing between one service and another. Countless UX and CX studies have shown that shoppers are easily influenced by the look and feel of a brand, despite the product or service itself being inferior.
If your business is in a competitive market, it really does pay to keep up with the competition. When other businesses in your field are coming out on top when it comes to brand identity, usability and even content strategy. It’s time to step up your website game.
5. There’s no space for blog or news content on your website
It’s true — content is still king. For many of our clients, regular online content is a great tool for bringing visitors to your website, and ideally converting them to leads. Blog sections are nothing new, but we see a surprising number of businesses large and small relying entirely on a static website, and one that hasn’t been updated for some time!
We don’t just build blog sections into websites. We also ensure that a robust and easy-to-use CMS is also in place, which makes it easy (and not arduous) for anyone in your team to write and publish a new piece of content.
6. Slow loading speed – your website keeps going down
Website downtime does happen, but nowadays, it really shouldn’t happen often at all. If your website is going down, or you’re finding yourself on the phone to customer support, it’s probably time to make a change. A website refresh isn’t just about the visual side of things. The technology and architecture is fundamentally important to your web presence.
We use reliable web hosting with 99.9% uptime. In the rare event of an issue, we won’t bamboozle you with tech speak and web jargon (unless you really want to know). We’ll always follow up and steps in place to avoid similar issues from happening again.
7. Your website is running on fossil fuels
Did you know that we use green hosting for all of our clients’ websites? Believe it or not, something as simple as a tweet or a Google Search releases carbon into the environment. Thankfully, there’s an abundance of green hosting services out there. These hosting companies run their servers on renewable energy, many use resources such as Ecologi to offset any emissions such as staff commuting to the data centre.
We don’t just stop there. Our entire design process takes on a planet-first mindset, and we do that from the heart. By applying this to every piece of work we do, we reduce our carbon footprint and can walk the walk with our clients too. Read more about that here.
8. The design is looking a little flat and boring
The barrier for entry to motion design is lower than ever. Increased broadband speeds alongside more accessible web technology means that websites can easily deliver motion to desktop and mobile visitors. Motion doesn’t have to be a big, bombastic animation. Perhaps it’s just subtle cues to help a user move through a page. Maybe it’s something fun like elements or components that change or interact as you click on them.
9. Your company culture isn’t coming across to your audience
When was the last time you thought about your employer brand? How you come across to potential employees (and clients too) is incredibly important. In a post-pandemic world where remote work has changed the way we think about whom we work for and where, company culture is key to winning over and keeping staff.
If you’re proud of your team, the work you do together and the values you share, you’re missing a trick by not articulating that on your website. Perhaps that’s through content from individuals within the company, or a dedicated culture page. Have you seen ours?
10. Your previous agency didn’t quite get it right
As we said at the beginning of this piece, agencies and clients don’t always see eye-to-eye. Maybe things don’t go to plan, and you’ve come away feeling a little jaded. Our thoughtful approach is a result of years of good relationships with clients from many industries. We embed thought into everything we do. By that, we mean that we’re not just going to design some nice pages and plop it on some eco hosting and send you an invoice.
At Orangery, we’re strategic, we’re understanding, we’re thorough, and we’re honest. From the beginning stages of helping you form a brief, all the way through to testing, launching and ongoing support, we’re an agency for life, not just for websites.