It’s hard to imagine that the web, as we know it, has only been around for about 20 years. In that time frame, web design has evolved tremendously. Unfortunately, some companies haven’t gotten that memo and have websites that are still stuck in the 90s. Here’s 13 signs your company website may be obsolete.
1. The site was originally designed on Geocities. Enough, said?
2. Two words: Clipart overload. Give yourself bonus points if any of the clipart is animated.
3. There are no clear calls-to-actions on your site. It’s all scrambled together in a sea of text and animated clipart icons.
4. The “intro” page plays some kind of cheesy background music that is completely unrelated to your line of work. The only people, who should be allowed to have background music in my opinion, are wedding videographers and/or video/special effects companies.
5. No navigation tab. Visitors aren’t mind readers, and they make up their mind about whether to stay on a website in under three seconds. If they don’t know where to go on your site, they will leave.
6. The website has an unusually bright or neon background color. I can’t think of one reason why the background of your site should be lime green. What’s wrong with black, white and/or dark blue?
7. Your website font of choice is Comic Sans. Unless your business only targets children under the age of 10, please do yourself a favor and switch to a more professional font.
8. Every page is a “work in progress.” This states one thing and one thing only, “you have a lazy web designer.”
9. You have an entire page dedicated to downloading animated screensavers and desktop backgrounds. News flash, this went out of style around the Y2K era.
10. Your website still has a “hit counter” on every page. Nowadays, we have sites like Compete.com and Quantcast that render “hit counters” absolutely useless.
11. Your website still has flashing text and/or images. Bonus points, if the text is comic sans. This was a common practice in the mid-90s. It irritated me then, and guess what, it still annoys me today. Flashing text should never be used as incentive to get people to click on a page. It will do the opposite every time.
12. Your website doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version. 25% of Americans use their mobile phones and/or tablets as their primary tool for searching the Internet. Don’t overlook mobile. It’s growing, and it’s growing at an unprecedented rate.
13. And finally, your current website resembles this trainwreck. Or, even worse, it looks like this.
