Anyone doing web-design and development knows how important the actual design side of that equation is. My thought for today have more to do with how you don’t really need my help to figure out if your website design is out of date.

1.    You haven’t updated stuff in a while

This is one of those things that, may or may not apply in your case but, If you haven’t updated stuff in a while you may be behind on the current web design standards. As an example, you may still use a flash animation intro. If you are then I am putting up a red flag. Flash is a no-no in a mobile-first world, which takes me to my next point.

2. Your Site Isn’t Mobile-Friendly

Anyone that studies how the web works or has not been living under a rock for the last decade knows that people do most things using a mobile device these days whether it’s a smartphone or a tablet. Argo it’s imperative your site be mobile-friendly and responsive. All this means is that looking at your site from a smartphone or tablet should be awesome.

3. Your Site Isn’t Secure

Let me be clear. When I say secure all I really mean to say is you have a pretty green padlock in your browser when someone visits your site and that your site always shows a URL like https://www.whatever.com instead of http://www.whatever.com This just means you have something called a SSL certificate installed which makes the connection between your server and the users’ device encrypted thus, secure. Also having an SSL certificate has become mandatory as of January 31^st ,2017 although some browsers can still handle non-SSL sites for now. Pro Tip: You can get a free SSL by using Let’s Encrypt. Most webhosts have adopted it. So, ask your hosting company or your developer of getting that sorted out ASAP.

4. Organic Traffic Has Dropped

If you have had a website for a while, then someone either showed you how to check if traffic is coming to your site or you figure out a way to do it yourself because your business needed it. Now let’s assume you had stable traffic initially when you created your site. Now, things change over time so assuming you have problems 1,2 and 3 or even just one of them than a drop in traffic is inevitable.

5. The date in the copyright credits in still 2008

If your site has a date in the footer and is says something like ©Copyright George Nicolaou 2008 and it’s 2018 that is a problem. I leave it to you to figure out why.