Galactia

Do I need a new website?

Most people arrive at this question holding the wrong evidence. The site looks dated, or it has been up for four years, so it must be time. Neither tells you much.

A plain site that says the right thing and takes an enquiry can outlast a redesign. A site built last year can fail all three checks below.

One: the words

Read your homepage and your main service page as if you were a customer who was told to look.

Does it describe the business you run now, or the one you ran when it was written? Businesses change what they sell, who they sell it to, and what they are good at, and the site is usually the last place that gets updated. If you have added a service that now pays the bills, or dropped one that does not, the words are already out of date.

Then check the language. Businesses drift into describing themselves the way competitors do rather than the way customers ask. If a customer would call it a rebuild and the site calls it a digital refresh, that gap costs enquiries.

Last, find where you tell someone how to enquire, and notice how long that took. Failing this check on its own is usually the cheapest outcome on the page. Words can be rewritten in the site you already have.

Two: the structure

Pick the thing people most often ask you before they buy. Try to answer it using only your site.

If you cannot get there in two or three moves, the structure is working against you. The common failures are a site whose pages match an old shape of the business, one that has grown an extra page every year until nothing is findable, and one that has a page for everything except the question people actually ask.

There is a version of this failure that looks like a words problem. If the answer exists but is buried in a paragraph three pages deep, the writing is fine and the structure is not.

Three: who holds the accounts

This one is different in kind, because it does not matter how the site reads if you cannot change it.

Check who holds the domain, the hosting, the files and the logins. If the site only runs on a platform you cannot take with you, or the accounts sit with a designer you no longer work with, then leaving is a rebuild whether or not you wanted one.

Do you own your website? walks the five checks properly. If the answer is that you are renting a builder, a hosted builder, or a site you host covers what you would and would not keep.

I put this last because it is the least visible and the most likely to decide the answer on its own.

Reading the three answers

  • All three pass

    The website is not your problem. That is a real result and it happens. Spend the money somewhere else.

  • One fails

    You probably want the smaller job. Rewrite the pages that are wrong, or fix the path to the question people ask. You do not need to rebuild a site to change its words.

  • Two or three fail

    Or the ownership check fails by itself. Now it is a rebuild, because the fixes stop being separable. Rewriting the words inside a structure that cannot hold them, on a platform you do not control, is three jobs pretending to be one.

What a rebuild costs beyond the invoice

If addresses change, they have to be mapped and redirected. Google says to use permanent server-side redirects and to expect rankings to fluctuate while the new URLs are crawled. I do not promise they stay put, or that they rise.

If the current site brings in search traffic you can name, that is a cost to price in, not a reason to leave it alone. You will also spend your own time. Someone has to approve the words, and that someone is usually you.

Cinema 7

Micky Sabat’s film and photography studio in Sydney. Referred people look the studio up, and the site had to show the work and explain how a job runs — a words problem. It also sat on Squarespace, where changing a page meant working around the platform — an ownership problem.

Two of the three checks failed, which is why it was a rebuild rather than a rewrite. I took it off that platform so he could change it without the constraint, and so he owns the domain, the code and the accounts. It is live at cinema7.com.au.

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