Website re-design
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Email AppWelcome to your Monday morning cup of buzz. My name is Mike and i’m the owner of MJTrends.com, broadcasting every Monday morning bringing you news and information related to small business and ecommerce.
Today I’m going to talk about website design. Our site hasn’t been updated in 3 years. In dog years – the design would be 21 years old, in internet years, the design would be about 80 years old.
In February of this year Google announced that they would begin prioritizing sites that are mobile friendly. I knew we needed to update the site to work better on mobile phones.
Best practices dictate that you make small, incremental design changes over time, so that you’re users don’t get shocked by a major overhaul. While I totally support this in theory, we couldn’t support it in practice.
The cost and time involved to incrementally update the site to a mobile friendly design was too high. We are moving forward with a total overhaul. We won’t be releasing it all it once – instead we are giving our users a taste of the changes by pushing it out to different non-critical parts of the site first.
The blog has been updated – which you can see here. Next will be the forums, then our tutorial pages, user account pages, and the rest of the site last – product pages and checkout pages.
I’m crossing my fingers that we don’t alienate our current customer base. The new design feels current, versus the old outdated version, and it works great on small and large screens. I’m hoping that despite the shock of a brand new design, we won’t see conversion drop and may even see it increase.
In closing – I don’t recommend this approach. It’s a risk, and if you have the money and time – update your site incrementally. As a small business with limited resources, we didn’t have that option. Furthermore, I felt that Google had forced our hand into moving faster and that ultimately this was the best solution for us.
Do you have a great story about site design or ecommerce? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at: mharris@MJTrends.com.
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See you next Monday.
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