Are You Trashing Up Your Website?

After a new website is launched, we do encourage all clients to routinely add to their website as it should be considered a work in progress. However sometimes in an effort to improve the site over time, the client ends up adding too many peripheral items that can impact the look of the site and the reader’s experience.

Particularly I have seen sites move from a “clean” polished look to a jumble when an indiscriminate amount of items are added to right or left side bars. Typically adding new content in the middle body section does not impact the overall look, but when you add to the sidebars, watch out!

It makes sense that if your page design has a left sidebar for features that you rotate features, but when you add, add, add, and never remove the site can start to look overly busy and become distracting to the reader. Add moving or animated graphics to this jumble, and suddenly your site takes on a “junky” look. I recommend that if you feel that you will have special promotions or features that you want in a sidebar location that you have these items integrated into your website design layout ahead of time, then stick with the number in the original design and rotate as needed. You can even have a features page linked from the sidebar and use the actual features page to highlight even more items.

The key here is to have smart growth, consider adding pages instead of sidebar features, add to your navigation instead of creating graphic boxes or highlights that site only on your sidebars. Keep your website looking “fresh” as your designer intended and don’t “cheapen” the look over time.