Spring Cleaning for Your Website: Six Simple Steps to Clean Out the Cobwebs and Boost Performance

As winter finally releases its icy grip and spring sweeps in with its sunny days and warm breezes, we all feel the urge to refresh our homes, from scrubbing the floors and windows to touching up paint and washing down siding.

Just as the cold months of winter can take a toll on your house, they can also have an effect on your website. From the busyness of the holiday rush to year-end tax planning and new-year forecasting, by the time spring arrives, your site may well be showing the signs of neglect as a result of your preoccupation with other areas of your business.

But as they say, there’s no time like the present, so why not take up your virtual broom and clear out the cobwebs? Here are six quick fixes you can implement today to give your site a boost in performance that will benefit your business for months to come:

1. Publish a new press release or blog article.

If the date on the last new piece of content published to your site was six months ago or more, that’s a glaring red flag to visitors that your site has gone stale and there’s no fresh information for them to find there. But in just a few hours’ time, you can eliminate that red flag by updating your company news section and publishing some interesting new content to your blog.

2. Update the copyright statement.

While you may not have given a second thought to the copyright statement on your site since it launched, don’t underestimate the impact this seemingly small detail can have on visitors’ perception of your site.

If your copyright statement is a year or two out of date, this is a glaring sign that indicates to a new visitor (whether accurate or not), that this site hasn’t been touched in ages. And, following that logic, they’ll question why they should bother to delve further into your site if you can’t even be bothered keep it current.

Bringing your copyright statement up to date won’t take more than a few minutes, but it will make a big difference in convincing visitors that the site is current.

3. Change the home page image.

In the world of website design, large, visually rich images are en vogue these days. This trend, however, is a bit of a double-edged sword. While these large images make a strong first impression, for repeat visitors, they can cause design fatigue and lose their impact altogether.

Don’t worry, though. You don’t need a complete redesign to breathe new life into your site. Simply replacing the primary image on the home page can make your site feel rejuvenated and prompt visitors to view its content with fresh eyes.

4. Visit the site on a mobile device.

How well does your site work on a mobile device? Better yet, when was the last time you actually tried to use your site on a phone or on a tablet?

Many website owners do not visit their own sites on mobile devices with any regularity – but your customers certainly do. In fact, industry experts predict that over 50 percent of all web traffic will come from mobile devices by 2015 (yes, folks, that’s next year!). Is your site ready to handle this influx of mobile traffic and provide a consistently good experience across a wide range of devices and screen sizes?

The only way to be sure is to visit your site on a few different mobile devices to get a feel for what your customers see. If it’s hard to navigate from one page to the next, if the text is difficult to read or if certain content elements (such as videos) don’t work at all, now is the time to start making plans for how you will adapt and evolve your site in order to accommodate this rapidly growing percentage of mobile visitors.

5. Install Google Analytics.

Do you know how many visitors are coming to your site each month? Do you know how long they stay on the site and how many pages they view before they leave? Do you know which pages are being visited most often?

This information and much more can be found simply by adding analytics software to your site. While there are a number of different options available, Google Analytics is an industry standard tool that is both free to install and intuitive to use. You can even set up automated reports so that you receive a consistent stream of data on your site’s performance and the traffic it is generating for your business.

Setting up a Google Analytics account and installing it on your site is a quick and easy process, but it does require adding some code to your site, so it’s best to seek the assistance of your web developer in the initial set-up. Once it’s up and running, however, you’ll have a wealth of useful information at your fingertips at the cost of $0.

6. Run a performance test.

How quickly does your site load for your visitors? Website performance is one of the most often overlooked aspects of a site’s success when, in fact, a site that loads quickly not only provides a better user experience for your customers, it can also help boost your site’s search engine rankings.

Pingdom offers a free website speed test that will give you invaluable information on how quickly your site loads, how large it is, how its performance stacks up against other sites and which elements of your page are the largest (and thereby have the greatest impact on load time). Based on the results of this test, you may be able to identify certain items, such as large images or videos, that could be compressed or eliminated entirely to give your site’s performance a much-needed shot in the arm.

Each of these six steps will take just a few minutes or, at most, a few hours of time to implement, but if you seize the day and do them now, you’ll reap the benefits for months to come of a site that’s fast, up-to-date and easily accessible to users regardless of device or screen size.

The Next Big Thing in Website Design: Wearable Technology

5 years ago, if you would’ve told me that people would be using mobile phones with tiny screens to access website content, I would’ve said that you were crazy. Obviously, I would have been quite wrong.

Today, I have clients who see more than 50% of their traffic come from mobile devices. The rise of those devices has changed the web design industry more so than any other thing I have seen in my 15+ years of designing and developing websites. Today, I see some of the signs I saw at the start of that rise in the growing popularity of wearable devices.

In this article, we will talk about what these wearable devices are, how they are used, and how their adoption may affect your business and your website.

What are wearable devices?

As the name suggests, “wearable devices” are ones that consumers actually wear on their body, as opposed to ones that they simply carry with them like a smartphone. Popular wearable device examples would be smartglasses, like Google Glass, and smartwatches, like the Moto 360 from Motorola or the forthcoming Apple Watch.

Each of these devices allow users to connect to the Web and access online content, and all of these devices feature screen sizes that are much smaller than what you will find on current smartphones. If you thought that it was a challenge to get your website content to be effective for a mobile phone, think about that same task now applied to an even smaller form factor!

It is that smaller form factor that is often given as a way to dismiss wearable devices ever being used to visit websites. Many people question whether a person would even want to access web content on those small screens. This is the same argument that was made early on in the rise of mobile devices like smartphones. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the wearable device is being used on its own, when in reality, the strength of these devices is how they connect as part of a larger ecosystem.

A connected ecosystem

Recently, we have been testing and experimenting with some wearable devices in our offices, including the aforementioned Moto 360 smartwatch and Google Glass. While these devices are amazing and powerful in their own right, they really begin to shine when they are paired with other devices, like a smartphone.

Yes, the tiny screen of a smartwatch makes reading long blocks of content or doing data entry on a webform uncomfortable, but those tasks can easily be bumped over to a connected smartphone. The watch can be used to filter this information. Instead of digging into my pocket to get my phone to check my emails or view online updates, I can more easily scan that information on the watch. Then, once I have identified something that requires my attention, I can switch to the phone, a tablet, or even a laptop of desktop computer to complete that task. In this way, I am using each device for what it does best – and both of them are accessing web-based content.

By connecting devices, you can also create actions or “triggers” based on certain parameters. For instance, in our testing we were able to take a picture with Google Glass and automatically publish that image to our Twitter account. Pretty cool, but we wanted to really take it a step further and see how far we could push this concept of connected devices and automatic actions. To do this, we purchased a MindWave headset from Amazon.com. This device measures brainwave activity. By using Bluetooth to connect that scanner to Google Glass and a smartphone, and with a little additional programming, we were able to create triggers that activated when certain thresholds were met. The first of those triggers caused Google Glass to snap a photo. The next trigger posted that photo to Twitter. These “triggers” were activated when the brainwave scanner sensed a change in a person’s brainwave patterns. We were able to demonstrate the process of automatically taking a photo and uploading it to social media – all with no input required other than changing the way we think.

Admittedly, this demonstration was a bit over-the-top by design. I do not expect consumers to start running around with brainwave scanners anytime soon, but the lesson here is that these devices, when connected as part of a larger ecosystem, can become so much more than the sum of their parts. As website owners, we really need to stop thinking about devices on an individual basis and start considering them as part of a larger whole.

Embracing the concept of "one Web"

When smartphones began to really gain popularity, companies realized that they could no longer ignore mobile by simply allowing their “normal” site (which was created to be used on a desktop computer, not a smaller handheld mobile device) to be sent to those phone screens. The solution that many companies embraced during this time was to create a separate “mobile-only” site for visitors using a smartphone. This solution became strained as tablet devices entered the market next.

Technically considered a mobile device, but with a screen size closer to a laptop than a phone, tablets really forced companies to question this “separate sites” approach. Yes, you could create one site for large, desktop monitors and another for mobile phones, but would you now create one for tablets –

leaving you with 3 sites to manage and maintain? With the rise of wearable devices, will you need to create a new site for each distinct wearable category? That is a long and expensive road to travel.

The desire to have only one website to manage and maintain has led to the adoption of responsive web design as an industry best practice. Responsive web design allows you to have one website that will automatically change its layout based on the user’s screen size. This was helpful when we had to consider mobile phones and tablets. With the rise of new wearable devices, this concept of “one web” is even more important.

If you intend to develop separate sites for each possible screen size, you will always be playing catch-up. As new devices enter the market, you will need to create a new site for each device type, which means you need to endure the time and expense of constantly rolling out new sites. This can quickly becoming overwhelming.

The reality is that there is no “mobile web”, there is just one Web and as the emergence of wearable devices has shown, our customers are using a variety of devices to access that Web and the content we put out there.

To do now

As wearable devices go from a novelty being used by the few to a way of life for the many, we want to make sure our sites will be ready. Don’t think wearable devices will ever be popular with consumers or used to regularly access web content? Again, that is exactly the argument that was given when smartphones first began gaining popularity, and we can see how that turned out. No, the question of wearable devices is not “if” they will impact our websites and audience, it is “when” they will do so.

If you have not already embraced the “one web” approach on your website, now is the time to really start exploring that option. You can begin by testing your website out on a variety of devices. If you have the ability to purchase these devices at your business, that is great, but even if you do not have the budget for devices purchases, you can still test your site on them. Visit your local Best Buy or other electronics retailer and see what new wearable and mobile devices are available today. Access your website on those devices to get a feel for what your customers may be seeing if they are visiting your site with similar devices.

You can also speak to your web or marketing agency about the rise of wearable devices and how to best prepare your site for them. By being proactive about wearable device support on your website, you can be a leader in the rise of these new devices, instead of a company trying to play catch-up after the fact.