Is an Old-Fashioned Website Harming Your Business?

When people ask for an analysis of their websites (I do that for free, by the way -- don't hesitate to ask me), one of the most common things I see is an old-fashioned website.



Here's one. This website is a good example of how websites used to look, long ago. Words and pictures and things were just stuck on the page one after another. Pictures were small. Nothing gave the visitor any indication about how to move through the site. People in those days expected to have to spend time figuring out what was going on with a website, and to have to read everything in order to find the information they sought.

In some ways, websites were like things on paper, in those days, but they wouldn't really have made nice brochures or anything. They were more like classroom handouts. It was kind of cool if there were pictures at all.

This site was also built in an old-fashioned way. Web designers in those days used the techniques developed for making tables of information, to sort of put things approximately where they wanted them to be, and it sort of works on some people's browsers.

Again, it was kind of cool, in those days, to be able to do anything besides just making a black and white page of text.

We are way beyond that now.



Here's the new website Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue and I worked with owners Eric and Cindy Studer to build for The Retreat at Sky Ridge.

Obviously, the new site looks more attractive than the old one. But notice the ways in which it works better:

• The name of the place is in the top left hand corner, where people who read English naturally look to begin getting information from a page, and it's large and different enough to work as a title. The old site had the name (the former name) in that place as well, but it wasn't visually distinct from the rest of the page.
• The navigation is obvious. It's in the place where people expect to see it, it looks like navigation, and the colors change on mouseover (the mouse, in the screenshot, is over "Contact") to help visitors find their way.
• There are clear calls to action. If the visitors are ready to book their stay at The Retreat, they can do that. If they want to get on the mailing list for special offers, they can do that too. Getting the contact info to make a call is easy.
• The site is built to modern standards. You can't see this in a screen shot, but it makes a big difference. As time goes on, old-fashioned kinds of website construction work less and less well, and before long they simply won't work at all. Trying to maintain a web site built with outdated methods is sort of like clinging to cassette tapes. It's only a matter of time.
  

If your business has an old-fashioned website, that may mean that you've been online for a long time. Good for you. You have domain age and probably also faithful visitors on your side.

But you may not realize that you have an old-fashioned page. The first time I heard my son talk about what astronauts did "in the olden days," I experienced some cognitive dissonance. To me, the terms "olden days" and "astronauts" didn't go together. I'm old enough to think of astronauts as kind of new by definition, and "olden days" as something that goes with maybe cowboys or knights in armor.

If you have an old-fashioned web page, then you might be used to it. You might not realize that modern users of the internet are going to look at a page like the "before" picture here and feel confused. Is that the homepage? Where are they supposed to go? What company is this, and what do they offer?

Highly-motivated visitors may search around to find the information which is after all, there somewhere. Most visitors, though, will spend a few seconds at this page and then return to the search engine results page whence they came, and go somewhere easier to understand.

I should add that I sometimes see quite new websites which have been built in old-fashioned ways, with old-fashioned designs. This is really sad. If you have one of those, then you've got the negatives of an old website without any of the positives. It's a bit heartbreaking to say "I realize you just had this built a month ago, but you know all that money you think you saved by having your cousin do it for you? It's an illusion."

If your website looks like the "before" picture here, you really have to have a redesign.