Is your website outdated or are you thinking of starting anew?

To remodel or not to remodel? That is the question.

Everyone knows that there is a season to remodel. Remodeling our kitchens, remodeling our bathrooms, remodeling our homes, etc., but who really understand what it means to remodel a website?

Or should you just move to a new home/domain?

Why is it necessary for you to update/remodel your website? The simple answer, everything gets outdated and needs to be redone eventually. It’s part of life. Let’s explore this with a house analogy.

Outdated Foundation

There are many very admirable and cool things to look at from a historical perspective in old homes. Layouts, designs, material makeup, etc. Wood and structural designs are beautiful, but they may become outdated and, to be honest, withered.

This is the same with websites. When they look old, there is something admirable about it, in how they look and how it was developed, “back in the day,” but these things become outdated. Websites’ foundation or code becomes old and outdated. When we are building a new house, we hire the best, most reputable professionals to lay foundation and design layout. The best remodelers don’t just start on top of the old, they start from scratch, or tear out the old, and build up anew. This is the best thing for one to do, otherwise problems will most definitely arise.

Outdated Functionality

Also, when a website starts to get outdated with its foundations, layout, or code, it starts to lose its functionality. Many old houses that I have seen are beautiful and we enjoy them from “afar,” but they start to lose functionality in today’s standards. Older houses were more compact, where new houses have wider spaces. New features in houses provide for higher functionality similar to how social media has become key for website functionality and traffic management. Houses need to be welcoming, fun and easy to navigate. You want to bring people to your website through Inbound, which is a new way of looking and executing marketing strategies, and be able to keep them there with easy navigation and useful or fun things to see or do. Do you want people to be lost or confused in your home?

Outdated Style

Fads come and go. Websites used to be simple. They contained pages with general content. Don’t get me wrong, content is good, but today it has to be more than just “good” content. There needs to be interactivity! It needs to be graphically appealing! It needs to have multiple pages that aren’t super long. It wasn’t always like this, but websites need to change with fads and be tailored to the users, just as much as houses need to be. You have to like the home you are living in and want friends and family to enjoy visiting.  You also need to like your website and want potential customers/clients to feel comfortable being there.

This is why the analogy of a house works so well with websites. Websites need to be made more modern, kept up-to-date on designs, have intriguing graphics for “today’s” people, and be dynamic in all the features it provides. Things change. Therefore, websites need to be “remodeled” and the functions that they hold need to be constantly updated.

Orion Group has been a NARI member for over 18 years and has more than 35 awards from NARI for remodeling/re-designing and developing websites. We hope to connect with you soon!