It’s difficult to quantify how spending a significant amount of money on updating your website will translate into more sales. There are no guarantees, but Maudience can make it as simple as possible to understand in using an actual recent example.
A local business has a very “pretty” website and it serves a very minimal function…simple services and contact and some basic information about their company. Not being technically saavy, they don’t understand the difference between design and function. Design is nice, but function is better.
The website in question was first built in 2004 and was considered state of the art at the time. It was built entirely with Flash Animation. Those of you who may know something about website development know what we’re getting at…Flash Animation does not work on most mobile phones. It’s totally unsupported on the most popular smartphone platform in the world, Apple iPhones. Most Android users don’t use the necessary plugins to view a Flash animation. Flash animation is notoriously unstable and unsecure. Even for desktops, Flash Animation can be tricky…long load times plus an increasingly impatient public, leads to frustration and downright anger on behalf of some.
50% of all web browsing these days are on mobile smartphones and tablets. So to this business owner, that means more than half of people who come to his website will see nothing at all. They will go away and conceivably never return. In some cases – because they see nothing on their phone or tablet – they’ll believe the site doesn’t exist and therefore the business doesn’t exist.
Sadly, this information isn’t totally a guarantee that a redesign will do them much good. Unfortunately, because they don’t realize much success from their current site there isn’t much incentive to make a new one.
In another case, a local business owner has redesigned their site using the knowledge of a sixteen year old family member. Being very proud of the family member, they aren’t totally seeing the value of having a professionally designed site. A lot of the so-called “free” design services make it fairly easy for a high school student to ‘design’ a website. Photos need to be optimized, meta tags to be added, keywords should be added…there are a massive number of things most users won’t even detect visually that need to be considered. Would you allow that same 16-year old to make call-backs to your sales leads? Why would you let them control your internet presence?
So no…there are no guarantees. But it’s a good guess that you could be losing customers before you ever had a chance to meet them.
