Spring Clean Your Brand Part 1: 5 Ways to Freshen Your Website
Let’s face it, your baseboard dust bunnies probably aren’t the ONLY thing that needs a deep clean this spring. If it’s been a while since you've given your brand a good ol’ refresh, take a look-see at this here blog post and keep your eyes peeled in the coming fortnights for Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the series, where we’ll address how to give new life to a different piece of your brand identity each week. Since it’s our belief that your website is one of the single most valuable pieces of branding your company owns, we'll start there and work our way out. Let’s dive in with five simple ways you can give your website the facelift it needs to be relevant in today’s digital market:
1) Declutter Your Site’s Menu
Is your site’s navigation a mish-mash of options that reads more like a book’s table of contents than a website menu? Time to streamline! In today’s short-attention-span, reader-resistant world, having a sleek, sexy menu is the best way to not only capture your visitors attention but to make sure they start...you know...actually CLICKING on things {which is the goal, right?}. Some easy tips to declutter?
Delete the “home” tab and make your logo clickable to the home page - The internet’s been around for a while and you can rest assured 99.9% of people know to click a site’s logo to get back to the home page, making this menu item pretty unnecessary.
Figure out what can be “nested” as a submenu item or as part of another page - Consolidating in this way helps decrease the need for endless menu options without taking away any valuable real estate on your site.
Delete the contact tab and add your contact info to the site’s footer instead - Most online visitors will scroll directly to your site's footer when they’re looking to reach out to you so trust them to know what to do to get in touch.
2) Make Your Site a Lead-Gen Machine:
Give your visitors as many opportunities as humanly possible to opt-in to your offer, email list, webinar, challenge, {insert your goal here}. This means not only having opt-in space on the home page and footer of your website but linking to or creating opt-in space on nearly erry.single.page your site has {including blog posts}. Maybe you offer a lot of valuable free resources to your audience? That’s awesome, we love that about you. Ask for an email address to send those super sweet nuggets to. Maybe you run monthly promos, mini-courses or educational hangouts? Perfect. Create a promo banner or website cover page and...you guessed it...ask for an email address to get access to it. People are happy to give their email away if they think they'll get something valuable in return. That means on top of giving people the chance wherever possible to be a part of your tribe, it's your job to be creative and consistent in delivering on that value promise.
3) Revamp Your Style Guide:
Give your website a fresh color palette {a great color palette should include at least 5-6 colors}, update your fonts to new and interesting combinations that are a bit more “with the times”, update your imagery with high-quality, free stock photo resources like pexels.com, incorporate new patterns, textures and backgrounds or insert some mixed media in your theme to spice it up {video backgrounds are all the rage}.
4) Create More Interactive & Intuitive Elements:
Novelty is attention-grabbing and convenience is...well, convenient. You can increase your site’s novelty by adding interactive design elements such as rollover effects, animated backgrounds and icons, or creating spaces for site members to engage more actively with each other or your team members. You can increase your site's convenience by creating intuitive and easily accessible communication and customer service channels like live chat, proactive help links, demonstrative videos and FAQs.
5) Rewrite Your Content Using a Better Formula:
On pages designed to sell your site visitor on a particular offer, service or product, arrange your content to reflect the following {aka: most effective} persuasive writing formula:
The offer: What it is you’re selling.
The benefit: How it helps your audience avoid pain or increase pleasure.