1. Images Take Forever To Load
Many websites that are designed by novices (or web designers who are just lazy) have pictures that take forever to load. With internet speeds being as fast as they are these days, there’s no good reason for images to be slow to load. If images are loading slow, it probably means the images are high-resolution images that are being scaled down to fit the website. This is usually the case when the web designer doesn’t know or doesn’t take the time to optimize the images for online use. The result is that the browser loads the entire image file and then scales it down for display in the smaller size that was implemented in the page design.
There’s a few problems with this beyond just making the page load slow. Search engines take into account the loading time of pages when evaluating sites. They don’t want to send their searches to slow loading pages because this indicates low-quality and most search engines have it as their goal to send their searchers to high-quality pages with relevant content.
Another problem with using large images scaled down is that they actually look worse than a lower resolution image. You would think a high-resolution image would look better but because the image needs to be scaled down so much to fit the chosen size, it ends up looking worse than if the right size image was used in the first place.
You can use a website like this one to test the speed of your site. If you have a slow speed problem, your images may not be optimized and you may need a website makeover.
2. Your Site Uses a Template
Don’t get me wrong – there are many good templates out there and I actually use professional themes to build affordable and attractive sites for my clients. However, there are many free templates for websites that are overused and unprofessional. You know the ones I’m talking about. They look something like the ones on the left.
Usually, these templates are perfectly functional but the challenge with having a website that uses a cheap template is it becomes difficult to stand out in the crowd. And with a world wide web made up of over 350 Billion websites and 150,000 new URLs created every day, it is becoming increasingly important to stand out from the crowd. If you don’t make your website stand out, there’s really not much point in having a website at all.
The other drawback of using a cheap template is that it can make your website appear cheap and unprofessional. If you are a small business trying to convince your clients and customers of your professionalism, your website will play important role in doing the convincing. Often times, your website is your first impression and if it appears unprofessional, you can count on losing many potential clients and customers about 5 seconds after they land on your website.
3. Your Site Uses Frames
You may not even know what frames are because they are so outdated in web design. Take a look at this ugly website to see an example of the use of frames.
If your site uses frames, I would consider it an EMERGENCY! You need a website redesign desperately and quickly!
So what’s so bad about frames? Frames were used in the past as a navigational tool on websites. They basically allowed you to open a web page within a web page which seems like a good idea at first. However, it is difficult to control and although it adds some functionality, it quickly becomes an annoyance to the website visitor and causes visual problems and navigational issues. The use of frames is not even fully supported by many browsers any more so you definitely don’t want your site using them.
If your website falls falls under one of these three categories, you need to seriously think about redesigning your website. What are you waiting for? Wait – I know. You probably think a website redesign is going to cost $5,000+, will take 3 months to complete, and will cause your website to be shut down for a long time. None of these have to be true. Check out my website redesign service and see how easy, quick, and affordable it can be to get your site looking fresh, usable, and professional. Or if my service doesn’t fit your needs, you can still contact me and I’ll give you some tips on other ways you can get your site redesigned and stand out from the crowd.