Update Your Website Design, Theme/Code at Least Every 4 Years
One of the best and most effective places to market your practice is the World Wide Web. However, to achieve the desired outcomes in this crowded and competitive marketplace, it is vital to update your website to ensure that it remains fast, secure, and relevant.
There are new trends emerging in website design almost every day, so it is a good idea to keep up with these new developments. Routine design updates actually help save money. It is essential to keep up with web standards. Consistency is an important factor while browsing the internet, especially for people who aren’t tech savvy.
Furthermore, search engines such as Google and Bing regularly update their algorithms. It is important to upgrade your website to incorporate their updates in order to maintain your search rankings.
The top reasons for updating your website include:
Visual Appeal
Your website is a direct reflection of your enterprise. It is essential to position your business and yourself as an expert in your field. In portraying this vision, first impressions are important. Therefore, it is vital to regularly modernize your website to keep up with the most recent design trends.
Similarly, if your website appears old and poorly developed, people visiting the site may believe that your business is also dated and poorly structured as well. The purpose of your website is to showcase your services and products in the best light possible to motivate visitors to learn more about you and potentially utilize your services or purchase your product.
A website should appear attractive and be easy to navigate on various devices. It should dynamically adjust for multiple devices regardless of whether the visitor is using a laptop, mobile, desktop, or tablet. It is crucial to not alienate any potential clients by maintaining a design that is responsive and can accommodate all types of devices.
Security
It is common to hear about websites being hacked. To make sure that your website is secure and safe from hacker attacks, it is imperative to ensure that the site’s software is regularly updated. When using content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or others, it is vital to ensure that these programs are up-to-date with modern technologies.
Your hosting account is another vital consideration. It is essential to make sure that your hosting service provider is reputable and concerned about security.
Responsive & Mobile Friendly
We are now a smartphone society. We’re spending two hours online on our smartphones every day; twice as long as laptops and PCs. If you factor that with the upcoming mobile-first indexing update from Google, ignoring the mobile market is a very risky business. It’s now considered the common practice to make a website mobile-friendly (responsive design).
Responsive Web Design is a collection of techniques that allow a website to flex and adapt to the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. Someone opening your site on a small smartphone could be shown on the same site as the person opening it on their laptop etc. For many businesses, it may even make sense to design your website “mobile-first”.
In conclusion, if you haven’t updated your website in a while the chances are that you may be driving mobile users and potential customers away.
Technique & Coding
Is your website browser compatible? Is your source code valid (HTML and CSS)? Does your website meet the basic web standards? Is the technique and/or (version) programming language outdated?
An important factor you should consider is the increase in usability in web design. Every year web standards change radically and techniques to build websites become more advanced to comply with the latest standards. If your site was developed several years ago, it probably has a lot of unnecessary HTML code and may be slowing down your website loads speeds – which may, in turn, impact your ranking in the Google search results.
Including modern techniques such as CSS coding will allow your web pages to adapt to all smartphone devices and either help or hurt your rankings if not updated.
Content
The overall design of your website can manage first impressions, but only in the beginning. After you have grabbed a visitor’s attention, you need to retain it by offering engaging and relevant content. The content should be entertaining as well as informational providing visitors with appropriate information on the products or services on offer.
Notably, you have only between two and four seconds to engage the visitor. Therefore, just wowing them with graphics won’t suffice. It is important to use phrases and keywords that can get their attention quickly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO
Along with an appealing design and excellent content, you also need to update your SEO to enable users to locate your website. SEO principles are continually changing, and every time Google makes algorithm changes, it can potentially impact your site.
Updating your website’s look and content also offers an excellent opportunity to update the site’s SEO settings. This may involve evaluating new content but may also require updating the associated code related to the new design.
About CreativeTake Medical Palm Desert, California
CreativeTake Medical is a full-service Website Design and Digital Internet Marketing company with decades of combined experience in the medical and e-marketing industries.
We specialize in:
- Custom Website Design, Hosting & Maintenance
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
- Reputation Management
- Medical Practice Consulting
- Branding, Logo Design, Content Writing
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