Time for a New Website Design?

It’s amazing how fast new technology trends change how we live and influence our decision making. Most modern businesses recognize the need for a new website design and the importance of search engine optimization. What they often don’t understand is the way most users evaluate their website. I found this interesting blog post by Catalin Zorzini on InspiredMag who compiled a worthy list of web design statistics.  Reviewing these may help you decide if it’s time for a new website design.

+ You have 10 seconds to leave an impression and tell them what they’ll get out of your website and company. After this time (and oftentimes before), they’ll leave. (NN Group)

+ Users only read slightly more than a quarter (28%) of the content they see on a web page. (NN Group)

+ 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. (Econsultancy)

+ 70% of people looked at bullet point lists over the 55% of people who read lists without bullets. (NN Group)

+ Most users scan websites in an F shape. (NN Group)

+ Once your page loads, users form an opinion in .05 seconds. (Kinesis Inc.)

+ Users prefer content in a visual format, which explains why online content video views have finally topped 50 billion views each month. (Clickz)

+ Mobile users now make up around 27% of the web usage. (Smart Insights)

+ $1.1 trillion in sales in 2011 were web-influenced. (Forrester Research)

+ Dark colors are better than light colors for more traffic (2% vs. 1.31%), pageviews (2.98 vs 2.91), bounce rate (44.4% vs. 46.2%), and average time on site (3.18 seconds vs. 3.15seconds). (Visually)

+ The United States (24.5Mbps), on average, has slower Internet download speeds than Sweden (48.9Mbps), Netherlands (46.7Mbps), Belgium (33.5Mbps), Portugal (28.9Mbps), Spain (25Mbps), Germany (26.4Mbps), Romania (57.9Mbps), Japan (27.7Mbps), South Korea (54.5Mbps), and France (33.5Mbps) to name a few. (Ookla)

+ 88% of users are less likely to return if they had a bad user experience. (Econsultancy)

Other points to consider when making a decision about a website redesign is whether your website is really representing you or your business the way you want it to. Does it fit with your current branding and sales strategy? If you’ve shifted the focus of your business, added popular services or products, you’ll want to highlight those first.

Old School Design

Knowing that first impressions do matter and that web users quickly move on when yours doesn’t grab them, take a look at your competition (if you have any) and see how modern your design looks in comparison. For example, an old html website is pretty recognizable these days. It’s pretty narrow, often cluttered, difficult to navigate, hard to read, and the content is stale. See Exhibit A:

Modern Website Design

Craig Grannell wrote in a recent blog post for Creative Bloq that “In 2014, the biggest web design trends included: grid layouts, flat design, background videos, and the increasing capabilities of HTML5 APIs”. Here’s a list for emerging trends in 2015:

• Background Hero Images & Full Screen Videos Instead of Sliders
• Responsive Grid Design that looks good across all modern devices
• Transparent and Vibrant Designs
• More attention to the user experience
• Wide Designs with Parallax Scrolling
• Hand Drawn Illustrations
• Unique Fonts

Need an opinion on your current site? Contact me to discuss a new website design today!