I was watching television the other night when a show came on about the 80’s. Having grown up in the decade that brought us Michael Jackson, E.T. and the personal computer, the show brought back a lot of memories.
Like Jane Fonda in leg warmers.
It got me thinking about how things have changed. Back then there was no Internet, no mobile phones and I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons, but fawning over Hill’s Angels on The Benny Hill Show was acceptable.
It also got me thinking, a popular web design company notes the changes that has been happening in the field and how much it has changed since I launched my first eCommerce store in 1994. Front Page was still something a newspaper had, Dream Weaver was a song from the 70’s, and a Photo Shop was where you took your film to be developed.
Building a website meant spending hours in front of a 13” cathode ray tube, hard-coding HTML line by line and popping Tylenol to kill the headache this work caused.
We’ve come a long way baby.
As part of my trip down memory lane, I visited the Wayback Machine to see what my sites looked like way back then. I giggled at their minimalistic design and lack of features. Wiped away a tear thinking of the great memories of those glory days. And said, “It’s time.”
It’s time for the shoemaker to make a new pair of shoes for himself. I spent the weekend working on a new look for my personal website and blog. It’s not completely done yet, as I plan to add a lot of additional content from the volumes of articles I’ve been featured in over the years. But it’s a good start.
A website or eCommerce site should be redesigned at least every 12 to 18 months. In between, you should constantly be updating content, refreshing graphics, adding features to attract buyers and increase order value. A stale website is just that. Stale. A successful one is one that isn’t afraid to take the leg warmers off, even if it’s sunny and 90 degrees.