Update your old site if you care about your business

How an outdated website can destroy your business

From the point of view of a non-professional, a distinctive sign of modern sites is a fundamental change in aesthetic approaches. Thus, the difference between the old resources built using free editors and up-to-date sites that are created today by serious companies with impressive portfolios, such as seclgroup.com, can be recognized at first glance.

In the rapidly developing world of Internet technologies, the essential condition for success is your online representation’s correspondence to modern trends and consumer expectations. Oddly enough, there are still managers who believe that there is enough to run a page on Facebook for communication with buyers or consumers of services. As for the website, they are inclined to limit themselves to a landing page or something site-like created several years ago when the company only entered the market.

This approach is more than counterproductive. It can withdraw your company from among the leaders and send it to eternal outsiders. Why? In this article, we will answer this question and tell you what requirements the modern site of a self-respecting company should meet.

A trap of inertia

To understand why even today, when trends and technologies are radically changing or updated every six months literally, many serious companies have a highly inexpressive representative office, it is worth casting a look back.

The beginning of the world’s digital revolution (a massive transition from analog bearers of information to digital ones and the development of related technologies) is customary to count from the mid-80s of the XX century. The first Internet providers, such as Psinet, Portal Software, Netcom, Uunet, began appearing. In 1989, the first commercial provider – The World – appeared in the United States. In the middle of the 1990s, the Internet started to penetrate massively into all spheres of life. Excessive hopes assigned to this new technology with businesses and shares holders even led to exchange collapse, known as the “Bubble of DotComes.”

Internet technology’s take-off and development led to the high demand for websites. The business card of a company representative, if its address was not indicated on it, starting with three letters: www, looked just indecent.

Demand has repeatedly exceeded the proposal, but, at the same time, consumer standards still needed to be formed. Often, self-taught programmers who independently have mastered the language of HTML were taken up for creating websites.

As an answer to such demand, various free and so-called “freemium” site editors and platforms, such as Dreamweaver, Joomla, WordPress, etc., allowed even a person without the necessary knowledge in site-building to create a primitive site, literally on a knee.

Thus, many companies have acquired just such web resources, representing their presence on the Internet.

There were several more years to the moment of the appearance of specialized companies, which can create a highly professional site, taking into account specific UI/UX requirements.

Around the same time, there was an explosion in the popularity of social networks. Many companies began communicating with their customers on Facebook and other similar resources. This situation has created a harmful illusion among the owners of many businesses, such a ligament – the old site + pages on social networks – is enough for successful customer interaction. But precisely, this illusion has fraught with many dangers.

Explosive errors

The most obvious problems that the old websites carry are the following:

• Lack of mobile version
• The confusing structure of the site
• Unobvious placement of headings and controls
• Complicated forms that require a lot of time to fill
• Lack of mechanism for preventing errors (the so-called “protection from a fool”)
• Outdated search engine optimization and – moreover – harmful SEO elements
• Design of the Web 2.0 era
• An abundance of Flash elements 
• Absence of HTTPS Protocol (signed SSL)

All these mistakes – either all of them or their significant part – are present on those old sites discussed above. At the same time, any of them can dramatically reduce the attendance of such a site, which means a literal collapse of the conversion indicators.

However, the user experience (UI/UX) approach to each interface element is no less critical, and often even decisive, factor. If a user once encounters difficulties on a non-optimized site, he is guaranteed to leave it. But this is not the end of the problems of the owner of such a site; they will continue irrevocably. According to BrightLoca company, the percentage of users more likely to turn to the seller with positive reviews can reach 91%. While 82% will put down the purchase, seeing a negative review. Therefore, it is easy to predict that the user, disappointed with his experience on a site that does not meet his expectations, will find a way to share his negative impressions with his friends. And this means that your potential losses grow exponentially.

Design errors that are guaranteed to get rid of your site’s visitors

Trends can bring your site to the leaders; at the same time, they can bury it forever. Those features, without which homemade sites we discussed in the first section were unthinkable, are black marks for your website today.

Here is a far from a complete collection of designer “birth injuries,” deadly for the modern site:

• Imitation of natural objects on the pages of the site – notebooks, books, pens, rivets, etc
• The use of textures as a page substrate – wood, brick, frosty patterns
• The redundancy of elements, a dark background, and a pretentious, difficult-to-read font
• Numerous photos from free resources – often, they are repeated on different resources and deprive the site of individuality
• Inconsistency of the site design to the corporate identity of your company
• The presence of Flash elements. At one time, no site could imagine Adobe without these offspring. However, already in 2020, this technology was recognized as obsolete. Most likely, browsers will refuse to open these sites or open them with monstrous errors.

Summing up

This is just a general review of the differences between sites from the Web 2.0 era and resources created by modern companies. However, the main conclusion is obvious: professional developers are able to provide your company with a successful representation on the Internet. At the same time, the old site, created without considering modern technical and aesthetic requirements, can scare off customers, even of the most successful company.