Update That Old Website With A Sportscoat

By on 07/15/2014


Not ready to redesign your outdated website?  There may be small improvements you can make to your website to buy you some time, including fonts, pictures and backgrounds.

Video Transcript:

Today, I want to talk about taking something plain and boring, and making it a little better than plain and boring!  What I have done to illustrate that is I wore a T-shirt today, and I put a sports coat on it, to make it look not so plain and boring.  If I wore just a T-shirt to work, I might get in trouble, someone might say, “Geez, what did you do sleep in late?”, but I put a sports coat on it and now it looks like I purposely put this together.  So, let’s take that concept and apply it to a website.  Maybe your website has been sitting for awhile, and you are not quite ready to jump into a redesign, yet, but you want to make it look a little bit better, make it look a little bit more modern.   I have a few ideas that are easy to implement and that may make a big difference in the way a user may perceive your website.

Website Fonts

The first thing to look at is fontsYears back, there were only a handful of fonts that could be used on a website, but now that the flood gates are open, you can use a lot of different fonts on a website, plus screen resolutions are getting larger, so you can use larger fonts.  So, when you look on a website and you see an old aerial 12 pixel file, a little small file, you automatically think, “Wow, this site’s is pretty old”.  So, don’t let that happen to your site; change your fonts.   Sometimes, that is really simple to do.   Find a nice modern font that is easy to read, plug it into your site, bump up the font size a little bit, if you have a small font, and it may change the whole dynamic of your website.

Website Photos

Another thing that may be easy to update is, a lot of us have old photos on our website.  You may have photo of a headshot that you took back when you were getting out of high school, and 10 years later, and it is still on there!  So, when people meet you “Wow, you don’t even look like the same guy”.  So if you have any of those, switch those out; get a new headshot- have someone take a picture of you in the forest with your iphones, like we did, and keep them fresh.  If you use stock photos, you can tell if those are old, too; you’ve seen those stock photos that you say, “Wow, those things are old”!  So, take a look at those- if you have any of those on your website, buy some more.  Go to somewhere like istock, where you can get a photo for 5 bucks!  Replace those photos; sometimes, that will make a big difference on your website, as well.

Website Background

Last thing, maybe another quick change, but, wow, it may have a huge impact is background.  Sometimes the sites have just white, a plain white backgrounds, and some may have those older textures and older patterns that you look at and you just know that those are older photos, textures, patterns, or colors.  Switch those up a bit:  if you have a pattern and looks outdated, try using a solid or a white.  If you have a white background, and it just looks like a 1994 Netscape website, change it to a texture or pattern and see how that looks-see how that plays into your graphics, images and fonts and those kinds of things.

So those are three quick and easy things that you can do, that can make a big enough impact on your website where you don’t have to have it redesigned right now, but might get you by for a little bit longer and still keep you a little bit up to date.

So that’s it for today…

I am Joel Black and hope this helps…

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