Keeping Your Web Design Fresh

I'm going to start here with a topic with which I know I can identify... food.  When you open your refrigerator, what food looks most tempting?  Is it that 2-week-old mystery object in the aluminum foil, or the rest of last night's apple pie?  If you're like me, you tend to pretend that science project doesn't exist until someone else does something about it (thanks, honey).  You're going to gravitate to the freshest items!

Websites are the same way.  People (and search engines) are drawn to sites that are constantly evolving, and why shouldn't they be?  Those are the sites that always have something new to offer and something interesting going on.  We all have our favorite sites that we check daily to see what they have new and exciting, whether it's sports scores, entertainment news, professional blogs, or humorous antecdotes.  (My daily dose of fun can be found at Clients From Hell and Cake Wrecks, among others.  Good stuff!)

A stagnant website is like a mediocre painting.  You may enjoy looking at it at first and may even come back one more time to make sure you didn't miss anything the first time, but that's about it.  You wouldn't make a special trip to that part of the museum to see it again before you leave.  You're just not that drawn to it.

You want a website for your organization that draws people back to it, and there are many easy ways to accomplish this.  Do you offer a Resources page where people can find useful information and links with valuable tools?  If you keep that updated, people will check back because you're giving them helpful resources all in one place.  Have you recently begun offering a new service?  You should use your website to promote it.  As I've discussed in previous posts, keeping an active blog insures that you always have fresh content, and it will also improve your SEO.

Keeping a website fresh does not have to mean a complete redesign.  Maybe your images could use a facelift, or you could decide to lay out the same information in different ways.  Another option is to have "featured products" on your home page that change from time to time.  The changes do not have to be drastic... a small change can freshen up a website just as much as moving a chair in your living room can change the feel in the room.  It makes you and your visitors feel good and refreshed.

When you make changes to your site, don't forget to announce them in your blog, on social media, or using email marketing.  That could be just the reminder that someone needs to visit your site, and who knows what kinds of leads that could generate.

Keep the fresh ideas coming, and stay out of stagnant water.  Until next time, keep swimming along!