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For most businesses and organizations, a Web site started out as an online billboard or brochure. As technology has changed — and it has done so at breakneck speed the last several years — Web sites have become online locations where audiences expect to get real services and take actions important to them.
“Modernizing” your Web presence — particularly if it involves multiple sites, complex e-commerce applications or extensive libraries of content — can be a long, costly (and sometimes painful) experience.
Our questionnaire can help you make an informed decision. The key is to keep sight of your organization’s goals and your audience’s needs. It can start with an idle comment: “Gee, the Web site looks kind of … old.”
Or with a complaint: “We need to add new photos to the site, but IT can’t work us in for another week.”
Or, worst yet, a nagging suspicion: “Are we doing everything we can online to have an impact?”
But how do you know whether it is time to redesign your Web site? Less than two years ago, a thoroughly modern Web site could ignore things with names like social media and RSS, accessibility and search engine optimization; it could do without Flash-based animation and “rich media”; it added new content weekly, if that often. It had no blog. When content needed to change, a technician was called in to work magic with HTML code.
But things have changed … and keep changing, almost daily it seems. What appeared up to date yesterday, today can seem so “yesterday”. More and more, organizations do not just have one Web site — they have many. Divisions, departments, product lines and service delivery units may have their own sites, sometimes under a corporate or organization umbrella, sometimes on their own. The more Web sites an organization has, and the more independently they operate, the more likely they are to dilute the power of your brand — and create the need for a new direction.
So how do you know when things have gotten to the point where your organization’s entire Web presence has to change too? How do you know when you have to contemplate the expense, the time and trouble it takes to redesign your Web site?
Your answer could come from months of committee meetings and study … or from a lunchtime hunch that “now is the time.” Either way, your decision could still be wrong if you don’t ask the right questions or understand the answers.
“Modernizing” your Web presence — particularly if it involves multiple sites, complex e-commerce applications or extensive libraries of content — can be a long, costly (and sometimes painful) experience.
Our questionnaire can help you make an informed decision. The key is to keep sight of your organization’s goals and your audience’s needs. It can start with an idle comment: “Gee, the Web site looks kind of … old.”
Or with a complaint: “We need to add new photos to the site, but IT can’t work us in for another week.”
Or, worst yet, a nagging suspicion: “Are we doing everything we can online to have an impact?”
But how do you know whether it is time to redesign your Web site? Less than two years ago, a thoroughly modern Web site could ignore things with names like social media and RSS, accessibility and search engine optimization; it could do without Flash-based animation and “rich media”; it added new content weekly, if that often. It had no blog. When content needed to change, a technician was called in to work magic with HTML code.
But things have changed … and keep changing, almost daily it seems. What appeared up to date yesterday, today can seem so “yesterday”. More and more, organizations do not just have one Web site — they have many. Divisions, departments, product lines and service delivery units may have their own sites, sometimes under a corporate or organization umbrella, sometimes on their own. The more Web sites an organization has, and the more independently they operate, the more likely they are to dilute the power of your brand — and create the need for a new direction.
So how do you know when things have gotten to the point where your organization’s entire Web presence has to change too? How do you know when you have to contemplate the expense, the time and trouble it takes to redesign your Web site?
Your answer could come from months of committee meetings and study … or from a lunchtime hunch that “now is the time.” Either way, your decision could still be wrong if you don’t ask the right questions or understand the answers.
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