Why annual website audits are a necessity

At least once a year, Facebook updates their site with a major change to a previously neglected feature or layout. And like clockwork, within seconds, the complaints start rolling in. Facebook isn’t alone in this – every medium-to-large sized company involved with IT or who has a reasonably well-versed IT department knows that change is required to keep the company invigorated and new clients or users rolling in. This same business principle applies to all businesses – including yours.

What do you do about the people who dislike the changes? Ignore them. Unless the opposition is in such great numbers that you are forced to re-evaluate the changes, your visitors will – in time – adapt to the new changes. Just about everyone fears change, and your visitor’s responses are simply one manifestation of this fear. This doesn’t mean you should come up with changes and implement them without any testing whatsoever. Make sure that any changes of larger than small proportions are sent off to people in the know for evaluation before you spend time or money on them. In otherwords, send your ideas to friends with design prowess or that have experience in IT and are methodological people. You need to ensure your reviewers have at least the following two abilities:

1. To be able to detect when something feels wrong. When they look at a website, the ‘sore thumbs’ should immediately stick out to these people.
2. To be able to provide structured feedback. For example, “I dislike the huge slider of images you have because they provide no functionality and don’t even represent your business accurately – it feels fake. Instead I suggest…”

People with these skills can detect problems and also provide tips on how to improve your ideas. People without these necessary skills will lead you in the wrong direction. Comments like “I don’t like it.” or “It just irks me” without any specifics or directions for how to improve are useless – make sure you don’t use those people again as part of your regular review process even if you normally trust their opinions on other topics.

Whether you sell items online or have a brick-and-mortar location, if your website currently isn’t improving your business, then you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to re-evaluate the website and make changes to improve the situation.

If you already have a steady flow of new customers, but could use more, then the right kind of website changes could be exactly the fix you need.

If you fear your stagnant website isn’t bringing in the business it should, contact us today. By providing general information about your target market and your key products and/or goals, our free analysis can help you improve your website and, in-turn, improve your business.