Welcome to 2015. Does your website say that when customers or leads visit, or does it still look like the Space Jam site (which hasn’t been touched since 1996)? While we’re all for a little nostalgia but an outdated business website can send your customers running to a competitor. Think your website could use a little sprucing? At G4 Design House, we offer affordable website development and design to bring antiquated sites up to speed. Below are the five signs you may need a new website.

1. Your website is all about Flash.

This might be the biggest offender on the list. Nothing says you’re behind the times more than a website designed with Adobe Flash. While back in the day, many business websites incorporated Flash intros (and some even used Flash for their entire site), they’re just not effective today. Without getting too into it, long load times and demanding system requirements can annoy visitors. Even worse, Flash doesn’t work on mobile devices, and with 80% of internet users turning to smartphones for searches, that’s a large segment of potential clients to alienate. Additionally, search sites (like Google or Bing) can’t index Flash sites, which means your site may not show up in relevant searches, again, losing you customers.

2. The tablet and smartphone versions look exactly like the desktop site.

You may think this is a good thing right? It’s not. If your mobile site is an exact duplicate of your desktop version, there’s a very high change that your customers are squinting at their phones trying to make out the content that’s displayed in very small font. They’re probably also having a problem with tapping through pages or filling out forms. Many studies project that the number of people accessing the web via a mobile device (like smartphone or tablet) will exceed those using a laptop or desktop computer within the year. At G4 Design House, all the sites we create are made with a responsive design, meaning they have flexible layouts that change according to the size of the screen the site is being viewed on. A responsive design makes the mobile experience a lot less frustrating and a lot more user friendly.

3. Your site isn’t social.

By now, you probably know you should have several social media accounts set up for your business. So take a quick assessment of your site. Are you social accounts linked? Whether you’re using icons or text, or even embedding a feed, your social sites should be present on your site. It’s a simple element that will help customers easily connect with you on more than one front.

4. Your content is locked in images.

Just like search engines can’t index Flash sites, they also can’t index content that’s embedded onto photos. While it may look cool, having your text flattened on a .jpg image means search engines can’t read your content – which again, can hurt your chances of appearing early on in search results. In building sites, we use Revolution Sliders and other elements that mimic the look of text-on-image, but keep the content Search Engine Optimized.

5. There’s a visitor counter somewhere on your site.

While the Space Jam site doesn’t have a visit counter, we wouldn’t be surprised to find one. They’re outdated, especially for a business website. While it’s cool to see the number of people checking you out there are more efficient and more detailed ways to do so. Besides building sites, G4 Design House also offers marketing services to track and boost your traffic. So you can go ahead and leave the visitor counter back with Space Jam in 1996.

There’s no shame if you find that your current website has any of these outdated elements. At G4 Design House we can take the content from your current site and revamp and rebuild it into a stunning, high-quality site your customers will be impressed with. Give us a toll free call at 800-667-7514 or send us a message and bring your site back to the modern era.