Guess what… Bizboost just turned 10 years old. How fast have those 10 years flown by!
It’s been interesting to reflect on how much everything that has changed in the last 10 years. A lot has happened in the world of web development and there are things that are possible now that we wouldn’t have dreamt of when we first started. It just goes to show that websites are never a “set and forget” type of product. As technology changes, what’s best for a business and their website also changes.
With this in mind, we have decided to celebrate our birthday by giving our clients an offer. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your website, we are currently offering 10% off the total package price if booked during the month of February.
A Few Benefits:
A Fresh New Design
Website trends are constantly changing. A design that was considered striking when it was created many years ago may now be considered busy, cluttered and outdated. They were often an assault on the senses, some had music playing to get your attention and moving images and it was hard for your eyes to decide what to take notice of first.
Today they are much simpler, they make good use of white space have simpler layouts that highlight the key message you want to get across and beautiful images tell the story much quicker than great slabs of text.
A fresh new design can make your website appear more professional to potential customers and that clients that visit your website.
More Control over your Website
The websites we were designing 10 years ago were all HTML and we were using software programs such as Microsoft Front Page or Dreamweaver to build them. If our clients wanted to update their website themselves they needed to buy and to learn how to use these programs themselves.
It was an exciting time when we were able to start building Content Management System websites that allowed our clients to manage and update their own web pages without the need for costly and not very user-friendly software programs. Now you can just do it using a browser window on any computer you like – if you want to that is!
Google-friendly features
Over the past 10 years, we’ve watched Google grow into a household name (how often have you heard someone say “hold on a minute, I’ll Google it”). Whether we like it or not, Google pretty much rules the world when it comes to a website being found easily on the internet. Given that Google never likes to sit still, they keep changing their algorithms and ‘moving the goal posts’. Most of the strategies we used 10 years ago to make your website ‘search engine ready’ would now penalise your site in the results if we used them. I’m very sure the challenge of keeping up with Google and all the technological advances that are happening at such a fast rate will continue to keep us on our toes into the future.
Screen Sizes
I still remember back to when we decided to start designing websites for a 1024px screen resolution because the stats told us that it was the most commonly used. Now that size monitor looks like a dinosaur. Websites now need to easy to view on a huge range of devices with a wide variety of screen sizes and resolutions from watches to home movie screens. Websites now need to be ‘responsive’ and adapt to the screen it is being viewed in. This was not something that was previously possible but is now essential to be being found by people searching for a business on their mobile device.
Layout
Ten years ago we were using tables to lay out the content on your web page. That needed to be abandoned once we started looking at websites on smartphones and tablets. If you set the width of a column for one screen then it doesn't work very well at all on something much larger or much smaller.
Use of colours has also changed. We now tend to use a simpler colour palette and limit the number that is used on each page. Dark text on a white background is much easier to read, particularly on a small device such as a phone. We also keep the font type consistent across all pages and all the text on the page needs to be just that – text and not images that cannot be ‘read’ by Google.
Extra Functionality
Another trend is to include user-friendly functionality to a website so that it becomes so much more than a static ‘brochure style’ site. Many of our current clients have chosen to update their websites with extra dynamic and interactive features to make the experience more user-friendly for their visitors. There’s a long list of things that are now possible – here’s just a few:
- Sortable tables that allow users to search for data
- Scrolling photo galleries and albums
- Embedded videos
- Social Media feeds
- Blog posts (that are optimised for search engines)
- Online stores that include postage calculators and that link directly with PayPal accounts or accounting software
- Easy to use contact and order forms that can deliver enquiries or sales directly to your inbox
- Interactive calendars
- Booking forms
- Member-only sections – to value add targeted information for your clients or members.
If you would like to see some examples of other clients that have recently updated their website, read our article here.
To view our different website packages, click here.
If you are interested in taking us up on our offer of 10% off a redevelopment package price, call us on (08) 8572 4470 or send us an email at info@bizboost.com.au.