Website Maintenance – Defining the New Services Industry Segment
High performance websites need a maintenance service plan. Websites are the central hub of communications for most companies. A proprietary website is the only place on the Internet over which you have total control of your message. Only you determine the purpose, function and content of your custom built website. The phrase “online marketing” fades away as being online is part of everyone’s daily life, work and entertainment reality. As such, the idea of “digital marketing” no longer works because websites are where brands live and breathe today. Virtually all communications technologies have gone digital. Keep in mind that your website can serve your business in many ways beyond displaying information and generating leads. Some businesses perform multiple operations through their websites which engage customers, strategic partners and employees. Others use websites as their primary customer transaction centers as in e-commerce. We call this “Operational Integration.” As you realize all of the ways to integrate the Internet into your business operations, major advances become achievable. With something as important to your business as the design and functionality of your Web infrastructure, you would think by this day and age a website maintenance service industry would be well defined and burgeoning. Amazingly, there is no clearly recognized website maintenance services category in the market. We know of no trade associations specifically dedicated to developing and supporting this (new) industry segment. Your website maintenance choices are generally limited to your website designer, agency or in house staff. If it’s in house, you probably use a CMS which may limit your ability to make certain changes you want. Of course, you or your staff must dedicate time to website maintenance. If you use your designer or agency, you may wince knowing that more invoices are coming once you pick up the phone or send a change request. Years ago we heard the clamoring for a better way to keep a substantial investment – your website – performing efficiently and delivering a solid return. We recognized this need and developed a business plan to provide the service. Having succeeded in building the service model, we now believe it’s important to develop standards and best practices for our new services industry category – website maintenance services. It will help to point out that we are not in the website design business, but practically every other web services company is. If a client spends $10,000 – $20,000 perhaps $50-grand or more on their company’s web design & development, it should start paying for itself quickly without another thick layer of expense just to keep it relevant and performing effectively. Convenient, affordable maintenance service plans should be plentiful in the market, but they are very hard to find. Obviously, it’s nice to be a diamond in the rough at this point, but we know there are market forces driving our niche business model toward a growing services segment. We’d like to help serve the marketplace by sharing best practices we’ve learned through patience, practice and continuous improvement of website maintenance services. We’ll begin by defining the website maintenance space using a simple analogy. Ford Motor Company designs new cars. Other people maintain them – for a good reason! It will help to clearly delineate Website Maintenance Service as separate and apart from Website Design & Development, so let’s expound on our analogy: Let’s say you’ve identified your new vehicle choice by looking through auto manufacturer brochures, comparing the designs, features and options you want. You place an order which goes to the manufacturer (Ford Motor Company) and your customized vehicle arrives at your local Ford dealer. The moment you drive off the lot, you have options for maintaining your new Ford. You can use your Ford dealership service department. You can also use any other dealership service department. They all have access to replacement parts and the tools to work on your car. Of course, most new car dealerships charge top rates for service to help cover their large overhead. Maybe your ideal auto maintenance choice is your experienced local mechanic shop. They too have access to all the tools, parts and technology to keep your Ford running sweet. They keep rates reasonable because all they do is work on cars and their overhead is much lower than a dealer’s. You appreciate knowing they’re an ASE Certified auto mechanic, being trained in current technologies and automotive best practices. Liken a website maintenance service company to your highly skilled and experienced local mechanics. They can be your best option for almost all of your service needs. You really can’t hire Ford Motor Company to service your new Ford. You can get pretty close by using your authorized Ford dealer, but Ford and other manufacturers are smart enough to know it’s better to have maintenance services handled locally and independently. Ford is in the business of designing and building vehicles, not operating thousands of service centers around the world! Your marketing agency or website design firm is in the business of designing and building websites. Providing affordable maintenance services drains resources from what they’re really good at – creating and building – so many of them treat web maintenance like a “forgotten stepchild.” Agencies and designers who offload maintenance to a trusted third party can keep their focus on better strategic marketing and design services for their clients. In fact, some of our best referral partners are marketing agencies and website design firms. The synergy of our relationships serves our mutual clients very well. Establishing and Codifying the Website Maintenance Services Industry Parker Web Service defines Website Maintenance as: Technical and content development services designed to monitor and maintain existing websites to keep them functioning and performing at optimal efficiency; services that perform updates and changes in five major areas: technical, operational, marketing, user-experience and Internet standards. We have coined the acronym – TOMUS – as an easy way to remember the 5 Website Maintenance service categories: Technical Operational Marketing User-experience Standards Setting Website Maintenance Standards Parker
Your Call to Action Leads to More $ales
Help your website visitors take the actions you both want. Your key messages to customers need to be strategically placed throughout your website but that alone isn’t enough to generate a return from your website investment. It’s vital that you create clear and simple highlight messages suggesting the actions your website visitors can take to help themselves – Calls to Action. If your website lacks Calls to Action (CTAs), you’ve probably lost a significant amount of potential business volume, and you can’t fault your web visitors for failing to understand your superior value messages. You need to take the responsibility to lead them. Most people visiting your website are not full of initiative, eager to take immediate next steps after learning about your business. You need to be the natural born leader when you design your website and know how to lead your visitors to “do the right thing.” People behave a lot like cats when they’re online. They like to do their own thing, especially when browsing or shopping. People abandon shopping carts, neglect to sign up for your informative newsletter and they only skim your important blog for headlines or bullet points while ignoring your brilliant nuanced articles. They purposely avoid clicking that big obvious button unless they are convinced that doing so will reward them. These are just a few reasons why your website performance will fail if you fail to include CTAs where needed. Let’s take a look at what you can do to improve your website response rates, conversions and purchases. CTAs can be in a passive form such as having your phone number prominently visible. Your “Contact Us” page is a passive call to action. It’s there for any time someone feels like contacting you. “Help” and “Support” tabs passively call your visitors to action when they need assistance. Alternatively, CTAs can proactively prompt a specific act at a specific stage of a relationship. For example, do you want your visitor to learn more about a service, subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or go to your store and make a purchase? The traditional “sales funnel” is an effective approach to creating an urgency hierarchy in your Calls to Action. Illustrated below is a simple, generic sales funnel. Beginning at the top of the funnel, you gradually lead your visitor to convert to higher interest levels and ultimately a purchase at the end of the funnel. Much is written about how to create sales funnels. Our focus here, however, is to determine what you need to do to incorporate the right CTAs into your particular website. There are numerous types of Call to Action buttons, each with a different purpose or stage of a buying cycle (point in the sales funnel). We’ll cover the most common in hierarchical order. They are: Learn more – Takes visitor to a resource or landing page with deeper information and sometimes a further call to action. Sign up – Brings visitor to a web form, often to subscribe to a mailing list or register for a service. Download – In exchange for some basic information (always an email address) a visitor can download a file directly from your website. Here you have created a lead for your CRM database. Get Started Now – A direct link to a new client or consumer engagement area for visitors who intend to do business. Free or Trial Offer – Registers visitor as a “customer” or “account,” usually with a log-in expiration or a credit card charge if no further action is taken. Buy/add to shopping cart – The ultimate action taken by your website visitors (as long as they hit the “Approve Payment” button) to complete the transaction. Where in the sales funnel; at what point of decision are your visitors as they interact with your website and convert to sales leads or new customers? This will determine at what stage you would use each of the above CTAs. For effective Call to Action design, first determine the specific action you want your visitors to take and then make it compelling for them. Use compelling word choice – Write powerful, bold and simple instructions. Your exact words will have a big impact on conversion rates. Make the wording as simple and straightforward as possible and follow these guidelines: Use simple, direct language with as few words as possible. Use a large, bold font for the key words. Make your words clearly call for a specific action. You want your visitors to think as little as possible about their decision to take an action. Create and build urgency – A sense of urgency will displace second thoughts and minimize distractions. Remember this little gem: “The more opportunities you give them to stop and consider what they’re doing, the more opportunities you’re giving them to say “no” (Hongkiat.com). Give your visitors an authentic and compelling reason to act now! Prices do indeed go up, supplies can indeed be limited, trial offers do indeed expire and sometimes you really do want to build your portfolio of business and are willing to offer limited privileges to new customers. Now is truly the best time to act! Make those messages crystal clear! Icons and images work better than text alone – Your conversion links need to be crisp, attractive graphic symbols or icons that draw the eye and communicate a desired step. Dimensional colored buttons just ask to be pushed. Bright shiny icons demand a mouse-over and click. A good Call to Action button or icon communicates its own request to be clicked. Repeat and Remind – Appropriately repeated Calls to Action in strategic locations of your landing pages increase conversion rates. Notice in the examples below how simple, succinct and specific the Call to Action messages are. Notice the minimalist simplicity of Dropbox. It works for them. The Apple Watch provides an elegant and enticing (profitable) insurance upsell easily skipped at the consumer’s choice.
Are your website images giving visitors a bad impression?
Stock and Do-it-Yourself Photography can do more harm than good. We humans are visually wired creatures. Therefore, great photography is the anchor and hook of most good website designs. On the other hand, bad photography can be a turn-off and repel the very people you want to engage. You need to figure out what separates good photography from bad photography. Many commonly used stock photos insult our intelligence or make us cringe; portraying real adults as living in a fantasy world. Business isn’t fantasy. It’s hard reality. To save time and money, some website owners will snap the best shots they can with a smartphone or point & shoot digital camera but the images are often very disappointing. Amateur do-it-yourself pictures can reflect poorly on your people, products and company itself. A real image of your business in action, strategically planned, professionally shot and well positioned can tell an entire story or instantly bring home a key message to a website visitor. Sometimes a spontaneous photo, capturing a moment, can be serendipity for a great hero image. Truly, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” As information architecture and concise word choice can help lead a prospective buyer to take action, pictures of real people in real places using real products make an online message more believable and enticing. Following are just a few reasons why you should invest in the right kind of photography for your website: Pictures of your people help website users picture themselves engaging with your business. They like to see the real people with whom they’re dealing. Pictures of your location and offices/showrooms will make face to face visits more welcoming. Pictures of your people making your products in your location lets your web visitors feel better about your quality. Pictures of your products offer visitors an instant way to qualify their interests in color, style, make, model, etc. Naturally, crisp, clear images are required to sell anything by e-commerce. Picture Planning Bad or useless pictures can be worse than no pictures on a website. Following a few simple guidelines will help you produce highly effective pictures based on your priorities. Let’s examine what works. Nielsen Norman Group’s eye-tracking studies have documented a dramatic gap in how users approach website images. Mainly, they found that: Certain kinds of pictures are ignored. Decorative and large feel-good images are mentally filtered out from actual content scrutiny. Some pictures are viewed as important or critical content. For example, “real people,” i.e., the actual individuals representing your business usually fall into this category. According to Nielsen Norman, the classifications of “good” website photo use include: People photos – IF they’re real people (opposed to stock images with models). Product detail photos – multicomponent images like craft sets get much more viewing time than wide angle whole product, low detail shots like flat screen TVs. Big photos – especially real products and places proprietary to your business. Information-carrying images – pictures that show something relevant to what your visitors are doing and thinking. The common conclusion of these website user-photography studies is this: “Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to ‘jazz up’ Web pages.” This means there are good photos and bad photos (and useless photos) when it comes to website design. You Call the Shots! There are 3 basic ways to acquire the photography you’ll need for a great website design: Professional Custom Photography, Stock Photography and DIY (Do It Yourself). Here we advise you to apply careful consideration. We’ll look at each method and weigh its merits. Professional Custom Photography is listed first because in our experience, it’s the best choice in just about every situation. Today’s advanced optics and digital photography technologies have actually helped lower the cost of this top tier way to get the images you need for a successful website design. The relative ease of digital capture and intense competition among many professional photographers allows you to get proprietary custom images for your business at significantly less than what it used to cost. Of course it’s very important to check the reputations, references, portfolios, pricing and terms of any photographer you would consider hiring. Do it Yourself Photography (DIY) can be effective in some situations. Thumbnail photos on common real estate listings come to mind as an example. It makes no economic sense to send a paid professional photographer out on multiple locations to set up gear and shoot house photos that change up constantly. Self-serve digital photography with a good point and shoot camera or even a modern smartphone is economical if you need a fast and flexible method for capturing custom images on the fly. Stock Photography can provide some bang for the buck if you can pinpoint an exact story-telling image or find good highlight images for use in style sheets and other design elements. A major downside to stock photography is that your chosen images might be widely seen on other websites. Other issues with stock images are they tend to look sterile, overly staged or plain old phony. Stock photos will often clash with the authenticity of your messages so be very careful of the images you choose, especially from a branding standpoint. The Parting Shot Our overall recommendation regarding photography is this: For the majority of your photographic needs, invest in custom professional photography. Almost all stock images are ignored as “dress up” and irrelevant to the visitor. If you’re like most of us, you wouldn’t trust yourself to take a critical photo or group of photos that will be prominently displayed and have lasting value in public view, right? So use your best judgement and strive for the highest quality possible when it comes to your image. Keeping your pictures fresh, new and consistently relevant with your key messages is another important consideration. Maintaining your website for the best user experience involves keeping your photos changing enough to keep returning visitors interested
Is your website invisible to over 60% of potential users?
Google bans non-responsive websites from mobile search results. You expect that people who search Google for your designated key words and phrases have a good chance of finding your content online. Your website users expect you to keep your information current, relevant and valuable to them. They also expect to be able to use your information on the device of their choice. Website User Experience (UX) has a lot to do with fulfilling user expectations. Web searches on mobile devices are increasing fast (now over 60%) but there are still many robust websites on the Internet that are not optimized to display across all devices and screen sizes. Google announced they will essentially “penalize” such websites because of poor mobile device experiences and lack of responsive functionality. Non-responsive websites are blocked from mobile searches so that users avoid the frustration. Beyond smartphones, Internet enabled consumer products are here and still more are coming. Household appliances and various items we use every day increasingly feature Internet-ready, interactive display consoles of varying configurations. Designers need foresight to understand how information can be presented and used by every device user. Developers need technical understanding and current tools to program fully mobile-responsive websites. So the question becomes, what discussions have you and your web team had about remaining visible and relevant through Responsive Design? Are you on a maintenance plan that includes keeping current with the technology curves of search algorithm and Internet Protocol updates? Designers and developers must apply a new approach to websites, informed by an understanding of mobile information architecture. How will content be laid out and appear on the multitude of different display orientations people use; landscape, portrait, square, big screen TV, phone, tablet, laptop, wearable, appliance…? The dominant search giant, Google, cares mostly about serving people searching for information on the Internet. Its chief concern is the searcher, whatever device they happen to be searching on. According to Google, “mobile devices — smartphones in particular — dominate digital media time: 60 percent vs. 40 percent for the PC.” That percentage grows larger by the day. They recently declared that mobile responsive design is a requirement for ranking and classifying websites for search placement. On April 21, 2015, Google launched their new algorithm that critics are calling “Mobilegeddon.” If your web designer is still designing for the desktop experience, you may be creating a mobile screen mess (or an invisible website) that you’ll need to clean up before Google will even begin to rank it for mobile searches. Search rankings have already dropped for relatively prominent websites that do not display or function well on mobile devices. Take a look at the two examples below from digital marketing firm Venveo: You can see how cumbersome and unreadable most of the non-responsive content is. Just try to interact with it on a small handheld screen. Conversely, the responsive site delivers a clear message immediately with a simple path to navigate and interact with the content. The good news for many of us is that mobile responsive web design is now considered standard best practice among the majority of reputable web designers. However, since this huge search algorithm update only occurred recently, there are still many prominent, robust websites that have fallen behind the mobile curve and still need to catch up. Don’t let yours be one of them! Is your website responsive? Unless you care very little about website traffic and your visitors’ user experience, you need to take this Google update very seriously. Companies are responding in large numbers by upgrading or redesigning their sites to be responsive. Google saw an immediate 5% rise in mobile friendly websites in only one month (May 2015) and that number is growing and at an accelerated rate. Your website needs to be mobile friendly right now or you will lose business to your more nimble and responsive competition! Take the mobile responsive test now! If you’re concerned about your website’s mobile search compatibility, here’s what you can do, and Google has made it fast and easy. Find out if your website needs a mobile upgrade by using Google’s simple test. Enter your web page URL into the search field at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. You’ll be served a clean, simple field to test your web pages as seen below: Within seconds you’ll know if the page you entered is mobile friendly or not. By the way, the company in the screen shot example above got their site fixed and it works great on all devices now! Note: It may be important to test every page on your website including your blog – its index page and the single view article pages. Many websites have been developed by more than one person and oftentimes “band-aid” patches are made for certain page updates which can corrupt the code for proper mobile display. In the many cases, converting an older website into a mobile friendly one will not require a complete redesign but rather some programming changes. In general, the older the technology used to build the website, the more work that will be required to fix it. Having a mobile friendly site is not an option, it’s a requirement. So what does it take to get your website responsive and mobile friendly? What to do if your website isn’t responsive: Should you find out that your website fails the mobile friendly test, chances are it can be fixed relatively quickly. However, every site is different and some may even require a redesign. The first step is really as simple as contacting your web design team and asking what they recommend to make your site responsive. If their response is vague, confusing or elusive in any way, you may need a second opinion. All respected professional web developers today are attuned to the mobile driven sea change in website development best practices, so it should be easy to find the help you need. If you’re not sure what to do or whom to call, feel free to contact
Meta Data Descriptions that Will Drive Traffic to Your Site
Meta data descriptions are an often overlooked but extremely useful method for getting more clicks to a web site, but still many web owners don’t put them to good use. Usually it is just a lack of information that keeps a web owner from using meta descriptions to their advantage, so let’s fix that today. Look at the picture below and notice the area in the red rectangular box containing text. This is the meta data description for this webpage. Most site owners don’t think this can be changed and settle for the default text from their CMS, but this data can and should be changed, to help web owners better define products or services to attract new visitors. If you use the internet at all, you see these descriptions every day, but you probably don’t realize how they influence where you click. Todays’ searchers are savvy. They want quick solutions to their needs or queries and if you don’t let a user know what you have, you will likely lose them. Meta descriptions offer the perfect opportunity to “advertise” your page. You need to think of a meta description as a 160 character bill board. What business out there would not take advantage of ad-free advertising space? As a web owner, you should not overlook this chance to talk to your potential visitors. Technical Aspects of Meta Data Descriptions There are important technical aspects to writing meta descriptions properly. When writing meta descriptions remember to stay between 150-160 characters. Most search engines will truncate any descriptions longer than 160 characters. Meta descriptions should always include keywords. Pick one or two keywords that are the focus of your page and include them in the first part of the description. When the keyword or words match what the user put in the search bar, they will show up in bold in your description. This immediately draws the searchers attention to your search listing. Make sure your description is informative and try to do this quickly. Write meta descriptions in a way that lets a searcher know you have exactly what they are looking for. End your meta description with a strong call to action. Invite the user to click through, read more, call today, etc. Tips for Writing Successful Meta Page Descriptions Writing meta data descriptions can be tricky at first, but just like Twitter, it’s amazing how precise and clever people can be when limited by text. Think of it as writing a great book teaser. Short, sweet, and to the point, but make the reader want to read more. It should be informative, but also compelling enough to get a searcher to click. What sets you apart from your competition? Is it selection, price, service? What will make the searcher choose you over the others? What makes you the better choice? If you know your product or service, and you know your competition well, then it should be easy to identify what to showcase. And no matter what, don’t forget the keyword(s). Once you’ve identified what to showcase, then it is time to sharpen your pencil and write a compelling call to action. A call to action is simply an invitation to the searcher to opt in (click your page). It is always a good idea to search your keywords and see what your competition is saying to attract users to click. Setting yourself apart often leads to success. Some great examples of calls to action are listed below: Free trial, quote, or download (people still love FREE) Call today Learn more Get details Grab Yours Now Will You Be There? Hope To See You Soon! What Are Your Thoughts On This? Read This Post This Article Will Teach You How To ______ If you are still struggling, you can find some great information about improving call to action language at buffersocial. Final Tips Meta data descriptions are the easiest way to tell searchers you have what they are looking for. Meta data is very similar to the labeling that goes into any product. When you are in the grocery store what motivates you? Price, packaging, or do you check the ingredients? The same things that compel shoppers to buy a product, also encourage users to click on your webpage. Give users your facts. Share your ingredients. Showcase your product properly and users will want to shop your whole website. We are working towards getting more clicks because we want more visitors, but you also have to realize that if your click through rate improves, then Google will reward you with higher rankings. So when your page is properly optimized with compelling meta descriptions, your webpage will perform better in the search engines. Proper page optimization leads to more clicks, and more clicks leads to higher rankings. The final advice we can give you about meta descriptions is to remember they are not written in stone. When you write new descriptions, you should monitor your site visits to see if your click through rates improve. Collect data for a reasonable period of time (usually 30-60 days) and if you don’t see improvement, then go back and modify your description. Maybe try a new call to action. Check your competition again to see if they have made any changes. See if they are offering something you are not. The truth is that most successful businesses evolve from year to year. Products change, services change, sometimes a whole business model can change. Just be mindful that your meta data descriptions should grow and change with your business. Keeping your message fresh and up to date will ensure you continue to attract the right searchers to your site. Having a great, informative, keyword rich description, with a strong call to action, will always drive users to your page. Now just whittle it down to 160 characters or less and you’re golden. As a final exercise in writing meta data descriptions, see what we wrote for this webpage: Meta
Use Passphrases, Not Passwords
The folks over at Trustwave’s Spiderlabs announced last week the discovery of more than 2 million sets of credentials for accessing everything from Facebook to email accounts. This find brings up an important reminder that we should not only regularly update our passwords (every 6-12 months is recommended, some recommend quarterly) but that we should look to improve the complexity of our passwords. Thinking in terms of passphrases instead of passwords is a good first step in achieving needed credential complexity. There are several methods for creating passphrases: Think of a memorable event in your life such as “I graduated from high school in 1988”. Now make the phrase a bit more unique like “I graduated 5th in my class from Davie County High School in 1988” or “I barely graduated with a degree from Davie County High in 1988”. Taking this variation step makes the phrase uniquely yours. Now create your password by taking the first letter of each word. In the first example, the passphrase would be “Ig5imcfDCHSi1” and the second example it would be “IbgwadfDCHi1” or make it more your own with “Ig5imcfDCHSin88”. This passphrase has 3 different character types (lowercase, uppercase and a number). If you want to add an additional character, use a symbol. An example: “Ig5!mcfDCHS@88” Another way is to go long versus complex. The more length a password has, the stronger it is. Check out the example below with “correcthorsebatterystaple”: It is important to note that you should use a different password for each login. This is a difficult thing for most people to do, much less remember each one. I recommend creating a unique passphrase model for yourself. Organizations often require certain parameters in the setup of their passwords, particularly in length and use of character variations. Take this into consideration when coming up with your own passphrase model. So for example, go with a special character start, a couple of common words with mixed cases (usually at the start of the word), and then a follow up two or three digit number. Following a passphrase model will help you remember passwords across the host of sites you use. Parker Web prides itself on providing a top-notch website experience. Schedule a call today.
Website New Design, Redesign or Refresh?
I am often approached and asked to create a new website for a company. My first question is always: “Why?” After we go through the concerns which range from “It sucks” to “It’s not making me any money” to “It’s broken”, I consider these concerns, take a quick look and judge if the design looks up to date or not and then make a determination for a new design, a redesign or a refresh. New Website Design: Strategic Graphic and Content Plan I recommend a new design when the site is obviously outdated and there is little to no content on the site. This new design is like starting afresh and going back to the drawing board. A new design requires a strategic approach with short term and long term business objectives considered in the planning for the content to be implemented. If done correctly, a new website design can be one of the more intense things a company goes through in defining their messaging and their businesses. Those who have done it correctly and well take a great deal of pride and accomplishment in the outcome. And typically they see the results they would expect from such an investment. In all three of the following examples, the next step involved a new design. This new design was required primarily because the company was still working out its messaging for the audience, had not invested in a content plan, and was spending too much time between designs before seeking their next update. 1998 – New Design 2002 – New Design 2005 – New Design A Website Redesign: New Graphic Design When making a determination on which direction to go, if I see obvious thought and planning put into the content, it is seldom I recommend a brand new design. I probe deeper into the concerns the owner has and get to what is usually one or two direct concerns. I recommend redesigns when there has been a fundamental shift in the business offering or a significant change in the business direction or mission, but the overall business remains the same. I also recommend redesigns when the site is content rich, but the current design is fundamentally flawed or seriously outdated. But ultimately, the big difference between redesign and a new design is usually the content. In a redesign, much if not all of the content survives the redesign process. So the major change is in the look and feel of the site, not the bulk of the content of the site. Continuing with the above examples, the owner went through one final new design and created a site (2007) which was very content rich and contained a better refined message. When Parker Web started working with the client in late 2009, instead of creating an entirely new design, we redesigned the existing site leaving most of the content structure in place and focusing our time working on a high quality look to go with the quality content. The resulting website redesign (2010) was a significantly smaller investment than a new design, but achieved the desired results. 2007 – New Design 2010 – Website Redesign A Website Refresh: A Graphic Update A website refresh is something I seldom see sold in the marketplace, but it is a very effective way to keep your site fresh and up to date. Usually the refresh candidate owner is actively involved in their site, their content is fresh and rich and their traffic is at expected levels. The owner is concerned that their look is getting a bit dated and perhaps some basic layouts need to be changed. On the whole the site is acceptable, but not exceptional. A website refresh takes into consideration current graphic trends and also looks at current content trends and, using the current site as its basis, creates a fresh look. Using the same site as above, a refresh was done in 2013. The refresh relied heavily on the previous design and incorporated new trends in user expectations and some improved product focus. This was again even less expensive than a full redesign and was designed, approved and implemented in less than two weeks. 2013 – Website Refresh Website Maintenance is Key When Ramsey Chain partnered with Parker Web in 2009, they quickly discovered the value in establishing a high quality core of graphics and content and then the value of ongoing maintenance versus doing complete redesigns every few years. By working with a partner that can provide ongoing updates, content additions, minor graphic changes and other needs, it is more likely that a refresh will suffice over a complete redesign and it is seldom, if ever, that a brand new design will required. Parker Web prides itself on providing a top-notch website experience. Schedule a call today.