April, 23 | 8:45 am | Posted by admin
What’s the expected lifespan of my website?
We all know that a website isn’t for life. Tearing it down and re-building is a daunting prospect, but the alternative can be a series of ugly extensions that end up creating an eyesore. A typical website now has a lifespan of 2 to 5 years.
What are the signs that your site should be condemned as a brand health hazard?
Honest answers to some of the following questions should tell you what you need to know:
Is it taking you or your IT team weeks to make the simplest content updates?
Has your site become a monster of legacy content living uneasily alongside new content?
Is your site genuinely supporting your brand position?
Is your site really engaging your key audiences?
These days, from a marketing perspective, a static site is a dead site. A high performing website surprises and excites with engaging content at its core.
Our approach to a new-generation site always starts with the same question: what do you want your site to do? The answer will, of course, vary from site to site, but at the very least it should enhance the brand. If your site isn’t performing this function, then it’s probably time to examine how it can work harder.
Where to start the refresh process? Well, at Thirdperson we would suggest examining the following broad areas to help define project scope and budget:
Audience
Who’s the site for? Let’s identify and examine all possible audiences. We need to establish who they are, what they want and their relationship with the brand.
Brand personality
Recapturing your brand personality can expose character traits that need to be either amplified or toned down. This can be a very rewarding and revealing process, giving you a chance to step back and take a brand reality check.
Interface and content management
Logical and structured content in a user-friendly, intuitive browsing environment is the goal. An agile, flexible and integrated content management system will help to facilitate a fresh and current site. The new generation of browsers, higher resolutions, wider screens, scrolling content, video, and an array of devices have destroyed the web logic that many thought was set in stone.
Content style
Regular content generation isn’t something that every marketing professional can afford, either in budget or resource terms. But cloth can be cut accordingly. You can often lighten the load by identifying existing content in other formats to help cement your market position. But make sure it’s fit for purpose online.
Social media strategy
Should you even have one? If you’re keen to establish your business as a leader in your sector, the answer is almost certainly yes. But a brand cannot live on one tweeter alone. The rules of the social media road need to be understood and carefully selected social media ambassadors may well be required to stimulate pertinent opinions, keep social media on-brand and generate traffic as well as followers.
Take3 – web logic in action
In what seems like the dark ages we designed the second generation website for Take3, a film and video company, and were thrilled when they asked us to take a look at a new site for them. Claudi Schneider, client services director at Take3: ‘We didn’t want to brief an agency and be presented with a solution; we needed to be part of the project process. The team were a key element in establishing audience motivations and content framework and Thirdperson’s process, tools and approach generated results that worked within our budget’
What next?
If this article has inspired you to ask a few searching questions about your website and even get the project ball rolling in the right direction, then we could start with a free evaluation of your current site.
Contact us to discuss further.
