A website, much like a product or a service, is a reflection of your company or your organization. With just a click of a mouse or a tap of a finger, an impression of your company or business is immediately formed in a visitor’s mind. Is your website taking too long to load? Bad impression. Is your website tough to navigate or hard to look at? Bad impression. Does your website look dated? You can see where we are going with this.

Whether you like it or not, your website’s design has the ability to make or break a potential sale, lead, or a new client/customer relationship. For this reason alone, it is imperative that your website is aesthetically pleasing, consistent with your brand identity, and is up-to-date with current web standards and practices.

Brand Identity Consistency

Since your website is a reflection of your organization, it is important that it expresses your organization’s brand in a clear and consistent manner. If you own a landscaping company, your website should be designed with your services, target markets, and brand ideologies in mind. This may seem obvious, but people tend to forget about brand consistency as other project details such as site functionality and site content become more of a concern. However, these principles are the foundation of any successful website, and they should never be overlooked.

Web Standards and Practices

Today, web standards and practices, both in terms of design and development, are changing rapidly. What used to be an impressive, unique design a few years ago can quickly become outdated. Because of this, it is important that all website redesigns are carried out with the most recent web standards and practices in mind. Standard practices such as top-level navigation, site headers and footers, rotating banners, and appropriate font sizes should always be highly considered when redesigning your website. By using common web practices in your website redesign, you can ensure that your new website will be aesthetically appealing, engaging, and intuitive to use.

Responsive Web Design

Ironically, due to the fast-paced nature of the web industry, standards and practices also change on a consistent basis. This has become especially true in terms of website size (measured in PPI or pixels per inch) over the past few years due to the proliferation of smart-phones and tablet devices. Today, people use their mobile devices to access the web just as much as, if not more than, their personal computers. Your website visitors have come to expect an intuitive and optimized browsing experience across all of their devices, otherwise known as a responsive web design.

A responsive web design is one of the main benefits of a website redesign. If visitors are unable to view and utilize your website on their smart-phone or tablet device, then they are less likely to want to stay on your website and to give you their business. On the other hand, if your website has been designed to accommodate all screen resolutions, then your visitors will be provided with a more intuitive, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing browsing experience, thus expanding your website audience.