Upgrade and Maintain Websites

Looking to upgrade your site? There is a shelf life for everything and all great websites still need to be revisited periodically! Times change, technology advances, and new features are ripe for the adding as your business evolves. If you’ve kept your website essentially unchanged for more than 24 months, now is the time to re-evaluate its performance and fit for your business. What can we improve?

Updating a Website To Fit You Again

Adding Great New Features

Up your website’s usefulness — give your users all the tools they need to know you, like you, interact with, and buy from you. Contact lists, cost calculators, online ordering, and up-to-date policies/procedures can be excellent features to keep a website current. If you’re a little dry on the ideas, grab my free gift of 35 Ways to Reimagine Your Website – this is on a “sister” domain but I assure you it is 100% me.

If you’re not sure what you could be doing to improve the ROI on your website, please shoot me an email and I’d be happy to talk with you and give you some ideas. Remember, you don’t need to implement everything under the sun: one single great idea is a perfect starting point and can sometimes be all you really need. Do one thing well, as the saying goes, and while it works you keep on doing it!

Removing Old Info and Getting Current

A handpainted We're Open signHave you let things go a bit stale on the website front? If you’ve still got products, people, or locations that are no longer relevant then we need to get them off and bring things up to speed. You don’t have to tell me twice that this kind of TODO list is not very inspiring…. Sometimes it can be just about as fun as changing your mailing address with the umpteen companies and government authorities who need to know about that sort of thing.

Whether your website was built in a CMS or not, we can turn this ship around and get you up to date. Maybe you just need a little refresher on how to remove employees or locations from your Admin Backend? Again, I’ve got you covered.

Spiffing up the Polish

If you feel like your site is essentially correct with the information, running smoothly, and generally current on information then consider some UI (user interface) upgrades. I’ve written before about how good design really does matter and while a very nice graphic design is in some sense timeless, we all want a little change to spark our interest. It’s like when you rearrange some furniture… Maybe you just change out the curtains or swap a chair and a lamp, but the effect is huge and refreshing.

You’ll notice that the biggest websites are doing this on an almost constant basis. If you are adding new features then this will become a de facto part of your site’s lifecycle because there will always be the question of how to fit in new things. If you are not consistently upgrading and adding to your site, there is no reason for you to try and match the pace of the online businesses whose UI is ever changing. But on a semi regular basis it can be a nice boost to make revisions here and there.

Think of the body styles on cars and trucks. Every few years there is the “big reveal” of the next generation body style, and then every year in between there are small changes to keep it interesting. Badges get bigger and chromier, then the next year they get smaller and more subdued. Often with web design this could look like “flat ui” rectangular buttons turning into rounded buttons, or the colors and typography being shifted somewhat.

Addressing Website Issues

You might have a buggy website (things “sometimes work”), cross browser issues (“it doesn’t look good in Safari”), or just things that seemed like a good idea at the time but your clients never quite warmed to. It happens.

Fine tuning is always part of the process which is why I give all my clients 6 months of bug fixing included at no extra charge on our projects together. That’s how important it is, and it’s my way of letting you know that I want everything to be smooth sailing for you long after launch.

I also get a lot of clients who have problems right off the bat. Maybe their web designer disappeared into thin air, or got loaded down with other projects and is too buried to even see the phone. If you have a current website that is giving you grief or not performing the way it is supposed to, I am happy to help and get things back on track for you. Do you have a WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine, Codeigniter, Laravel, custom PHP, some other open source CMS, or Node website? Give a shout and let’s get this stuff fixed right up.

Make it sparkle, make it count!  Email me your ideas or if you’re coming up dry, ask for some of mine.