Web sites don’t last forever. Even if your site is optimized for the current vision of your business, you can’t accurately account for the future. Eventually, you’ll have to make some changes as part of your strategic brand management strategy. Some of these changes can be accomplished with simple maintenance, but patching and revising can only take you so far. If your site is outdated or it’s just not working well for you, it’s probably time to consider a full-scale site redesign. Here are five signs that it’s time to revamp your site, courtesy of Erin Ferree, a brand identity and marketing design strategist at elf design (elf-design.com):

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1. Your business has evolved. If your business has changed direction or grown significantly, or you’ve decided to offer new products or services, a Web site redesign will pay off. Consider how the changes to your business should be reflected or addressed in the structure, design, and brand strategy behind your Web site.

2. Your site looks like it was designed in 1995. Some signs of an outdated Web site include chunky, slow-loading graphics; old-style “framed” coding, where the site is divided up into panes that load separately; animated clip-art sprinkled throughout the site; and text created as images instead of in HTML. These flaws could reflect poorly on your business, making you look behind the times. It can also make you look like you don’t care enough about your business or about keeping abreast of technological advances. A modern-looking Web site will increase your credibility.

3. The information on your site isn’t user-friendly. If you cringe when you read your site content, or if you regularly get questions from visitors about the copy, restructuring the information or rewriting it can help alleviate the problems. Moreover, if you’ve been adding content to your site over time, and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, it may be time to restructure the site’s architecture. You want visitors to easily find their way around the site and have access to your information within a few clicks. Laying out your site to make that possible will greatly improve the visitor experience.

4. You’re not getting good search engine results. Content that is not fully optimized for the search engines leads to poor rankings, as does poor coding and design. Flash sites, for example, are also more difficult to optimize for search engines. Poor rankings can be another effect of not coding in HTML.

5. The site isn’t bringing in inquiries or helping you make sales. If your site was designed long ago to act as an online brochure, it’s unlikely to attract a steady flow of customers and prospects. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales, be sure your site includes calls to action, contact forms, an opt-in e-newsletter program to help you keep in touch with customers and prospects, and downloadable articles and white papers that answer questions about your products or services and help prospects move closer to buying.

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