So, you’ve got a website already. You’re pretty happy with it, its working, getting visits every day, people are learning about your business and your product, everyone’s happy right?

Perhaps.

Let’s go a little deeper. Could your site be doing all these things for your business in a more efficient and ultimately more productive way? Could it reinforce your brand image more effectively and consistently? Could it be securing even more leads and connections for your business? In a nutshell; is your current website really fulfilling its true potential? If you’re unsure about the answers to any of these questions, then you need to seriously consider a site redesign.

The web is a constantly changing, evolving medium. Because of this fact, websites need to evolve along with it in order to stay relevant. If your website fails to adapt to its new environment, then you will almost certainly be lagging behind the competition online, more and more, year after year. But what do you need to change in order to stay competitive? What new capabilities can be harnessed to benefit your particular business in your chosen industry? And how do you ensure that your new site remains fresh for as long as possible? Of course, these are complex questions that can’t be answered in full detail here, but what we can tell you is that there are three main areas to consider when you finally decide to go ahead with a redesign. These are Design, Coding & SEO and Social Media.

1. Design

Think of your website like a car. While your car gets you from A to B, your website takes users from their chairs into your brand, into your business, your world. If your users have a choice between a new sports car, or an old beat-up lemon, which one do you think they would take for a spin? Of course the sports car. But remember, design isn’t just about flash over performance. Maybe the absence of an on-board computer made that lemon more reliable? Good web design blends style and flair together with ease-of-use, good information organization, techniques to make you appear more frequently in Google or any other search engine (SEO), and an adherence to Web Standards to name a few. Your site’s design must also reinforce your brand and boldly display your company image. Further on from this, your website should be a representation of both the current state of your business, and where its headed. It should tell your visitors as much about the company today, as it does about its future. Remember, this is the face you are showing to the world, if it doesn’t represent who you are, what you do or what you are selling, then how can you expect your visitors to understand your business properly?

2. Coding and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The way your website is built directly affects how search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, find and display your website to potential visitors. There are many companies which specialize in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which basically translates to “Getting You More Visits”. This of course is a vital element to your online presence that must not be overlooked. However, many ways to optimize your website for search engines should already be common sense to all good web designers and developers. In fact, what “optimization” really means in many cases is “coding your website the way it should have been done in the first place”. Now, while I must admit that I am not taking into consideration the idea of back links or other SEO methods, to be perfectly honest, additional SEO techniques cannot truly be effective if your actual site is poorly coded from the beginning.

The coding of your site also plays an important role in determining how long the current redesign will remain relevant. As mentioned before, proper adherence to global Web Standards are vital for any redesign (or initial design for that matter), as doing so will ensure that your site obeys the rules laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (the people who make the rules). So, just as solid houses are built on solid foundations, truly solid websites can only be built from solid coding practices.

3. Social Media Integration

The year is 2010, and quite frankly, if you don’t have a blog, facebook page and twitter account, then you’re already missing out on huge opportunities to increase your network, customers and clients. Furthermore, if your competitors are using these methods, then they are most certainly gaining leads through them, and a lead gained for your competitor is a lead lost for you. Scary right?

“But how is this related to my site redesign?” I hear you ask. Well, let me explain.

The true power of Social Media, comes from integration. Through integrating and cross connecting your Social Media Spaces (such as your blog, twitter account or facebook page) with your website, and indeed with one another, you are creating a network for your users to explore, learn from and interact with. Never before has the communication line between customer and seller been more direct or efficient. Through these connections you can potentially interact with all of your customers directly, at once, with a simple text message from your phone. Have a special offer on a new product? Through Social Media Integration, you can tweet this from your phone and have it display on your website, blog and facebook page, all at the same time. So to put it simply, with Social Media Integration, you’re presence on the web is no longer confined to a single website, it can become a network which people can access through other websites which have hundreds of millions of users.

So, what’s next?

Well, if you’ve read up to this point, chances are you’re in need of a site redesign. So who should do it for you? Naturally, my answer is going to be a little biased here (but you were expecting that right?).Creativelifeform delivers, implements and excels at each of the points above, on a daily basis. So if you are in need of a site redesign, or know of someone who needs one, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

On the other hand, if you have all these aspects integrated within your site already in that you’re happy with the design of your homepage, its coding and the social media aspects of your online presence, then don’t be fooled by someone trying to push a redesign on you. The web constantly changes yes, but that doesn’t mean your bank balance needs to reflect these changes all the time.

The other day I stumbled across Typekit. Founded by a San Francisco based startup called Small Batch. This service oozes professionalism and class, and its the kind of idea that I think might actually, finally, solve the problem of lackluster typography on the web…maybe.

A little bit of research on the company shows that they are pretty serious about what they do, having made substantial contributions to the corner stone of every site online these days; Google Analytics. What they are doing with Typekit is approaching font foundries and (I guess) buying licenses to serve their fonts to anyone who signs up. They then distribute the fonts you select with your account to a nominated domain, and voila; you can set tags, classes or ids which will have custom font-family properties given to them by a small slice of javascript code which you include in the head tag of your page. Its that simple. Massive kudos go out to them for their UI design and the methods they are using to implement their service. It really is top notch.

“But what about the fonts?” you say. Well, of course they don’t have the big names on board yet (the service is relatively new), but after such a long time coping with about four different usable typefaces online, anything new is a breath of fresh air to me. My main concern at this point is how the deployment of the service works. There’s a limitation on the number of websites they will serve fonts to per account. If you want to place fancy fonts on your client’s website well, I guess you are going to be footing the bill for that. I’m not sure if many clients would understand the intricacies of good typography and why they have to pay more for something they can read fine for free. Then again, perhaps that’s just about focusing on making your pitches better. Also, its worth mentioning that they aren’t supporting all browsers yet; only IE, Safari and Firefox get Typekit love. It would be good to see Chrome creep into that list soon, I can’t imagine it would be too hard seeing that they’re already supporting Safari.

All in all, Typekit is a pretty awesome service. While I don’t think that the fonts in the Trial account are all that good, signing up did let me experience the pure simplicity and speed which they are offering, and honestly it did its job. I can definitely see myself upgrading to a paid account in the near future.