Refreshing your website: 3 case studies

12/2/2021

It's 2021! Is it time to give your website a refresh?

If you want to keep visitors engaged, interested, and using your products or services you need to ensure that your website looks appealing and functions well.

Are you nourishing your website with fresh content? Are you shouting your name from the rooftops? Or are you a bit embarrased because you've been ignoring your site for years?

You don't necessarily have to completely rebuild your website but a bit of a revamp can make a world of difference.

Reasons for a refresh

Tweaks to a company logo or change of colour palette, or if you have totally rebranded so the website no longer looks as if it is part of your business.
Your site is unappealing and dated - first impressions count and most are design-related.
You haven't updated the content for years and it is no longer relevant and doesn't reflect you or your service.
Wanting to focus on a different aspect of your business.
New functionality needed, like a blog or gallery.
Ensuring your website is responsive for mobile devices. If it isn't, this could be costing your business. Tackling this issue can increase the amount of time visitors spen on your website and help you improve your search engine rankings.
Improving user experience with changes to the navigation or adding a search facility.
High bounce rate or low conversions - if people are visiting your site but not staying for long, not buying or signing up, a refresh may help.
Low search engine rankings - this could be due to lack of relevant content or lack of updating content. You should also check your keywords, page titles and descriptions. Using an SEO expert or content manager / copywriter could be money well spent.
Security concerns - an SSL certificate is crucial and you should be seeing a padlock in your browser and not a ‘not secure’ warning. This is easy to remedy and, if you have an online shop, can help boost sales.

Here are 3 clients who went down the route of a refresh.

STONE GLOBE LIGHTS

This website was nearly 7 years old and usually we would recommend a redesign at this point. However, because it contained an online shop it would have been a much larger investment for the client. We also felt that we could substantially change the look and feel of the site with a new layout for the home page and adjustment to the colour palette without starting from scratch.

Stone Globe Lights

The old website had a black background which worked 7 years ago, but now felt dated. We lightened everything up using white and shades of pale grey. We added rotating images to the home page and made these much larger to fill the screen.

Latest blog articles were removed from the home page as the client was not able to keep this as up to date as she wished. There is now a clear link to the shop instead.

The content on the product pages had grown substantially which meant a lot of scrolling for users. We installed a tabbed menu so that visitors can read sections at a time and not feel so overwhelmed by text.

For years the client had been adding photographs of her lighting products in situ to a plain web page and calling it a gallery. However, due to the amount of photos on the page it had become very cumbersome to view on mobile devices. We have now provided her with a proper gallery, which is also much easier to keep updated.

Stone Globe Lights

https://www.stoneglobelights.co.uk

RASASC RAPE CENTRE

There were several reasons for a refresh of this website:

The organisation was keen to tweak their logo.
Altering the focus of the home page very slightly so that there was a prominent link to ‘getting involved’ where visitors could find out more about fundraising, volunteering and making a donation.
Using more photographs.
Changes to the navigation were required and the content needed a lot of updating.
RASASC had been growing their publications resources and wished to develop this section of the website.

RASASC

The site was still fresh and inviting so we did not want to completely change the look and feel, but introducing rotating images on the home page to direct visitors to specific pages and the use of graphics has made a world of difference. Minimal changes with maximum impact.

Adding a database for the publications was something that we could ‘bolt on’ without too much trouble. It means that these can be downloaded from the website or there is a link out to Amazon for purchase. Developing this area into a valuable resource will now be very easy for the client.

RASASC

https://www.rapecentre.org.uk

ILLUMINATE CHARITY

The main reason for the refresh of the Illuminate Charity website was the fact that they wished to increase their focus on corporate work as a way of generating more income. The bright colours had worked well but they were now looking for a cleaner more minimalist/contemporary feel.

Illuminate Charity

A lot of the content needed reworking to encompass the new business offerings and the client was able to do this themselves using the content management system. However, there were certain changes to the style sheets and functionality that they needed our help with.

The home page now has 2 clear entry points for visitors depending on whether they are an individual or a business. Rotating images also show the different aspect of the work Illuminate does.

Illuminate Charity