Is Your Website Hip and Happy?When is it time for a site redesign? Some points to consider. (Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, January, 2001) While there's no point changing your website design every few months just to be chic—that could be an expensive habit!—every few years, it may be time to evaluate whether the site is doing its best job for you. You should be able to answer yes to every one of these points. If not, it may be time for a rehab. Doesn't have to cost very much, either. * Contains genuinely useful information that's also easy to read * Is easy to navigate * Gives visitors clear reasons to return, and/or provides a mechanism to capture e-mail addresses and return to them, with their permission (for example, a newsletter or tipsheet) * If it's an e-commerce site, leads visitors logically to the action you want them to take * Makes the entire visit easy and enjoyable * Loads fast even at 28,800 bps * Provides mechanisms for visitors to contact you I'll use my site, http://www.frugalfun.com as an example. It went live in the spring of 1996, with about 40 pages and a very stark, pure text interface. The only graphics on the site were the covers of my books (and some foreign language greetings on the home page). After a year, I was acutely aware of some problems in my site. It was just too hard for people to find their way around! Plus I wanted to stay in touch with my visitors, so I started my two Monthly Frugal Tipsheets. I bartered with a website designer, who did a navigation bar on the left and a pair of sign-up forms for the tipsheets, and this second incarnation of the site stayed up for over three years. For the first two years, I was pretty happy with it. But then, I found it was hard for the site to evolve in new directions. As I added categories, the navigation bar was getting unwieldy. And the look of the site just didn't feel modern (and was getting a fair amount of negative feedback). To top it off, I discovered that when search engine spiders come to visit, some of them were returning my navigation bar instead of the beginning of my content—ouch! I did some instant patches: changed some of the fonts on the home page, hired someone to program a decent order form. But I knew I needed a more in-depth solution—one that still maintained rapid loading, increased ease of navigation, and opened up more areas of the site, and at the same time looked attractive and modern enough to compete for "eyeballs." It took me about a year to find someone who could meet my needs at a reasonable price. And one of the most important changes is the use of cascading style sheets—this will allow me to modernize the look of the site by changing the definition of certain page elements, once. I won't have to upload the entire site again! And since, at the time I did the modernization, I had about 350 articles up, and another 100 or so waiting for the site redesign, this was no small consideration. We settled on a design that put a two-color background around a logo and the page title, moved the nav bar to the right (and shortened it), and put some headings and footers in a clean sans-serif font. I wouldn't want to use that font for body text—so much of the web is hard to read precisely because it's all in 10-point Arial—but it makes a nice visual impression. We put all three tipsheet signups in the same box, so people can sign up for any or all of them at once. And we added a secondary navigation system: a drop-down menu that makes all the most important parts of the site accessible with two clicks. And again, if I tire of the look, I can change it all by changing one file. Is it perfect? Certainly not! I would like to have had the menu activated by hitting the enter key, as an alternative to clicking on the bar, to name one example. But it's huge improvement at a very modest cost (in the low three figures)—and it got me 80% of the way with 20% of the expenditure for doing the whole thing exactly the way I'd want it. My site is now almost five years old and is on its third major revision. It has brought me many thousands of dollars in consulting and copywriting fees, book sales, and ad revenue—and the total cost to me including the initial design (done by an intern, for free), two professional site redesigns, and nearly five years of hosting fees, has averaged under $300 per year. There are still no fancy animations, no graphics except for the book covers, no bells and whistles—just a large, useful, comprehensive, and successful site that will continue to earn money for me and build my reputation in the years to come. Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.
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