5 ways to freshen up your website

You don't have to build a brand new website to improve the look and feel of your online presence. Renovating your existing website is often a much cheaper and less time consuming alternative and, if done properly, can have a transformative effect on your business image. In this article, I talk about five ways to freshen up your website that won't cost you the earth.

1. Replace old images

​Changing one or two pictures in a room of your home can make a big difference to the way it looks and feels. With websites, visuals are a key element in terms of defining how your website looks and feels. Images set the tone of your website and are a powerful tool that, when used wisely, can completely change the nature of your site.

Replacing old images with new ones is a relatively simple exercise provided the new image doesn't require a complete rewrite of any supporting text. Depending on your budget, you can use stock photos (cheaper) or engage a professional photographer (more expensive) if you want to customise your look.

Whatever you do, don't use poor quality images. While the selection of a suitable, high quality image will greatly improve your website aesthetics, the use of a low quality one will do the exact opposite.

2. Promote Any New Products and Services

How long has it been since you updated your website with information about how your business has changed? If you've added new product lines or developed new services for your clients you need to TELL THEM ABOUT IT.

This might mean adding new pages to your website or replacing the content on one page with the new or updated information. Either way, it's all good stuff for humans and Google to absorb the next time they visit your site.

3. Get Animated

The use of MOTION on a website is a great way to highlight specific content that you want your website visitors to read, listen to, or watch. Statistically, animated videos of 30 to 60 seconds duration are one of the best ways to attract attention and communicate information. But there are less expensive ways to create motion on your website:

• Animated GIF's
• Parallax Scrolling
• Looping Background Video 

​All of the above elements can be used to create subtle movement that will enhance the visual effect of your site, but be careful, too much of a good thing can be distracting and detrimental.

4. Add A Blog

Using a blog to share your specific expertise will not only help build your brand authority, it's great fodder for Google Search. By using a blogging system that creates search engine friendly pages, you will be helping to improve your overall search engine optimisation (SEO) every time you put up a post.

Publishing fresh content on a regular basis will keep your visitors interested and position you as an authority in your field. Enabling comments to your blog posts add an interactive element to your website, allowing you to gain valuable feedback and respond directly to your visitors comments, suggestions or complaints.

5. Change your website Layout

I've left this one for the end because the level of difficulty (and cost) of changing the structural layout of your website is dependent on the type of platform your website has been built on.

Changing the fundamental structure of your website can have huge benefits, particularly if your visitors find your navigation structure hard to use or if your existing template is not responsive to different devices like mobile phones, tablets and laptops.

The ideal (and least expensive) situation is having the option to apply a new template to your existing website without losing any existing content. The platform we use to build websites does just that, this means we can apply a completely new template to your existing website without having to manually re-enter all of the existing content. It's then just a matter of doing a bit of fine tuning and hey presto, the emperor has a completely new set of clothes!

Once you've refreshed your website, let people know about it. Send out an email to all your clients to let them know about the changes and invite them to check it out for themselves by providing a link to your home page.