Are you haunted by your old website?
We do a lot of website upgrades and although we encourage clients to start fresh, we’re often startled to see so many items carried over from the client’s old site.
As we approach the scariest time of the year, let’s banish the spirits of your old website once and for all.
1. Phantom Messaging
Your business is constantly adapting, and your website should always reflect your current services/products and what differentiates your team from competitors.
When working on a new website, we spend a lot of time helping clients with a strong web-based value proposition and high level messaging on key pages. But, we often see phantom content in other areas, such as:
- About/Who We Are page & description about your company
- Service / Product descriptions
- Key headlines on the home page
- Team bios
When is the last time you’ve reviewed & updated your web content?
2. Medieval Logos & Branding
We often say that having a brand new website design with an ancient logo is like wearing a brand new suit with an old pair of sneakers. Logo styles change just as often as website trends, and it can be challenging to present a modern brand with an outdated logo.
A website redesign project can be a great time to reassess your business’ logo and brand identity. We find that a lot of clients will utilize the website style guide, which we provide during the project, as the new standard for their new color scheme, font choices & imagery.
In addition to the website, you should make sure that these items below always reflect your spook-tacular branding:
- Sales proposals & brochures
- Social media profiles
- Email newsletter templates
- Email signatures
3. Ghostly Imagery
In addition to phantom messaging, we’ll often be spooked by images on internal pages or blog posts of a site. The most common example of this? Team headshot photos.
We understand that it can be challenging to get new headshots taken, especially with more people working remotely these days. One solution is to skip a professional photo shoot and ask each employee for a nice headshot photo that you can edit with a standard background color. We’ve done this trick on our own TinyFrog team page.
When selecting images for blog posts and internal pages, follow these tips:
- Use stock images from high-quality sites like Getty Images or Shutterstock
- Always start with the largest, high resolution image and then resize for the site
- Upload the proper image sizes for blog featured images and banner images
- Never download images from Google search and place on your website, as you’ll be violating copyright regulations
4. Mummified Marketing
When discussing a potential website project, we often discuss the current site with clients and hear how certain features and pages are no longer relevant to their marketing.
For most businesses, the website is the hub of all marketing and business development channels, and your website conversion goals should always match up with your campaigns.
If you haven’t assessed your site and marketing recently, take a look at the following items:
- Calls to action
- Contact page messaging
- Landing pages for marketing campaigns
- Email newsletter sign up forms
5. Zombie Links
While our team takes care of any 301 redirects and the steps to avoid 404 errors on the site, we often see a lot of mistakes post-launch with deleted pages and a client’s overall web presence.
Once your team is editing content and updating things on the site, it’s important to make sure any 301 redirects are set up if you delete a page or even blog post. In WordPress, it’s very easy to set up a redirect for a URL in the dashboard.
But, your business’ overall presence is much more than just your website. If you’ve updated your website domain or changed major business info like your address or phone number, make sure to update that information everywhere, including your:
- Top industry directory sites
- Social media profiles
- Google Business profile
Who you gonna call?
You don’t have to do a full redesign project in order to tackle the items above. The more often you review your site and make tweaks here and there, the better results you’ll see.
And if something looks scary, give us a call and we can banish the ghosts of your old site.
