If you’re a responsible website administrator, you must constantly revise and refresh your website by: 1) studying other successful websites to suss out their secret sauce, 2) knitting your brows over your site’s click-through stats, staying times, and other info-rich metadata, and 3) taking your consumers’ complaints about your website to heart, logging these complaints, and deciding when it’s time to address them.

If you’re doing all this, it may sound like The Sherwood Group is suggesting that you constantly tweak, revise and refresh your website to maximize its appeal to current and prospective clients. NOT SO.

You’ve got to change and stay the same

Jakob Nielsen, a top website usability expert, states soundly that:

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. Every time you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That’s good.

So how do you keep your site fresh and responsive?

These two techniques provide the magic formula:

Make sure your site follows good usability practices such as placing Search in the top right quadrant, changing the color of links after they’re clicked, placing the main menu front and center, etc. If your site doesn’t already have a usable interface, this is something you want to change right away.
After you structure your site for usability, keep it fresh by frequently updating photos and articles, checking existing content on a constant rotation so it doesn’t become outdated, and change colors based on your current campaigns or branding changes.

In other words … as long as your website has a design that works, you can keep it fresh within that design. Your clients will enjoy the changes while still feeling masterful when they easily find that link they clicked last time. And you just can’t wipe a smile off your face because your site continues to pump out the usability stats that prove you’re meeting the goals you’ve set.

Contact The Sherwood Group for more information on maximizing
your website design and keeping your site fresh.

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This article is published by The Sherwood Group: Creative Agency, Graphic Design, Web Design:
The Sherwood Group has over 30 years of experience working with all sorts of companies, small and large. Our clients range from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 firms, in nearly every business sector, from across the street to around the world (and yes, even Europe, China, and South America). Our goal is to create advertising, graphic design, website design, and marketing communication that still looks fresh and relevant 10-15 years later. Our mission is to stir your imagination and leave your competition shaken and wondering, Now what do we do?” We are located in Livingston, Texas.

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