Spring Cleaning: Refresh Your Website for the Season
Our favorite time of the year is here! Spring is the season of growth and rejuvenation, two principles that are as important in business as they are in nature. There’s no better time than now to revitalize your website’s design, performance and messaging.
Spring cleaning for your website is what you make of it. In this article, we will introduce nine simple actions that you can take to give your online presence a new and improved look and feel.
Bring in new images
You won’t believe how powerful images are when defining your site’s vibe until you replace them. That’s why new visuals make such a big difference in a website makeover. Adding and removing images from your site is one of the most simple elements of creating a website. One simple click and you got yourself a whole new look.
Of course, if you’re already committed to adding new visual material to your site, you could go all the way and set up photo shoots, get professional photos of your latest products and explore a new style that you think compliments your brand. If you have followers on social media, you could ask them to send you photos of themselves interacting with your products or your service.
Freshen up your SEO
A great bonus in energizing your site’s content is that this process helps to improve the website’s ranking in search engine results. By updating your site, you’re essentially signaling to search engines that it is an active and vibrant sphere, not some dormant web page that no one cares about.
Why not take it a step further and think about new ways to refine and tweak your site’s SEO settings? Adding new texts, checking for incorrect links, optimizing image descriptions or listing your URL with web directories are just some of the steps you can take to get your site higher up there on search results.
Highlight your latest and greatest
You may not realize this, but unless you tell your site visitors about new and cool things you or your brand are doing, they probably won’t notice themselves. Spring cleaning is a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on your recent breakthroughs, products, blogs or features. They deserve it!
Add some spice with columns or strips
Want to try something different without having to design an entirely new site? Use strips and columns to make your site layout more enjoyable and more interesting. Strips divide your site into horizontal sections, and columns – you guessed it – do the same with vertical ones. These divisions are not only great for the design, they also boost the user experience significantly by offering a clearer content hierarchy and a more elegant browsing.
Fine tune your product options
Did you know that you can show your customers 30 different versions of the same product? The deal is in the details, as we say. Don’t settle for a general description of your gorgeous products. Speak to each and every customer’s taste by adding variations of colors, sizes, material and more. Adding more options is a sure way to increase sales, and while you’re at it, you also update your website’s content and send good vibes to the search engines that are looking to index you higher.
Test a new font scheme
Sometimes, the meaningful change is not in the content, but in the form. Or in this case, the font. Switching your website’s font scheme may not sound like a drastic move, but it definitely can give your site a nice and smooth facelift. Fonts can influence the way in which people interact with your content quite significantly. You can see in our ultimate font guide how different fonts can be used in different contexts and for different purposes. And in case your heart is set on a very specific typeface, you can now upload your own font directly.
Put some motion into it
If you’re starting to feel that your website is a bit too static and you’re looking to add a dynamic touch to it, we have not one, but several options for you try out:
Animations keep things interesting by making your site elements move around.
Video backgrounds bring your entire site to life with a captivating visual effect.
Parallax scrolling adds a layer of depth to your site background that creates an effect of motion.
Cinemagraphs provide a fun and subtle movement without causing a distraction.
Now all you need to do is choose :)
Start your own blog
Always wanted to share your expertise on the Web? A blog is probably one of the best ways to do so! The fresh content you’ll publish will keep your visitors interested (which is excellent for your traffic), will improve your visibility and will position you as an expert in your field. In fact, there are many reasons a blog is a very helpful addition to your business.
Try new sources for traffic
Updating your website is not only about new content, it’s also an effort to bring in new audiences and testing new avenues for your online presence. This is the time to experiment with traffic sources that you haven’t yet tried – whether it’s PPC advertising, social marketing, a backlinking strategy or any other method that you’re interested in exploring. It will not only bring you a boost of new site visitors, it will help you gather more insights about your target audience and refine your marketing strategy in return.
