Does Your Website Need a Refresh?
If your website is older than about 5 years, you should look at it and ask yourself whether it looks up to date. Most websites start to look dated in that amount of time, because technology changes. In an article last year on Responsive Design we pointed out how the width of a website can be a dead giveaway that a website is old.
Back in the 1990s, websites were narrow, either 640 pixels wide or eventually 800 pixels wide. Monitors that could only support those sizes. From about 2001 to 2007, websites of about 1024 pixels wide were the norm, but starting around 2007 most websites were 1200 pixels wide. Today many people have monitors that are 1920 pixels wide, so the width of websites has increased again.
In addition to the size of a website, well over 50% of all web browsing today occurs on phones and tablets rather than computers, and that means your website needs to be “responsive”, meaning the pages will will change depending on the device viewing them. This is very important if you want visitors who use small devices, particularly visitors in their teens, 20s, and 30s, to be able to view your site comfortably.
There are also other design changes from year to year. Currently, most websites have at least one photo that spans the entire width of the site, regardless of how wide it is.
While no one wants to waste money changing a perfectly good website, consider an update if yours is more than 5 years old, because it’s probably starting to look dated.