Today’s manufacturing buyer is much more internet savvy than his or her predecessors, and, as a result, websites are becoming paramount to the decision-making process. Your website should be acting as a salesman for your business and a redesign of your website can result in a much needed boost for the performance of your business. You stand to gain improved search engine optimization (SEO), new web exposure and the ability to generate leads to diversify from your existing pipeline. Outlined below are five of the most common signs a website redesign is overdue.

A couple weeks ago someone on the team showed us a "heatmap" of the newly re-designed homepage. Having never before seen a tool like that in use, I was intrigued by the visuals on the screen: little points of light depicting every click over the past month, bands of rainbow colors showing where users hovered and scrolled, color-coded constellations of link referrals.

About six months ago, my family and I moved to a new house. There’s obviously a lot of work that goes into moving - packing everything up from the old house, getting the new house inspected, cleaned and prepped, and not to mention the actual move. There’s one thing that doesn’t seem that important, but it could make a big impact in your life if you don’t do it: filling out a change of address form with the Post Office.

Business websites are the most important components and the focal points of every company’s online marketing strategy. Given its importance, it is surprising to hear that one third of visitors to manufacturing websites rate them as “very bad” (joint study by Google and ThomasNet). But that’s not all: two thirds of visitors also say that they never return after having a bad user experience.

By now we all know how prevalent the mobile experience has become for email and the web. Meanwhile, thanks to widespread access to broadband, email marketing and the web have grown more complex, feature-rich and even bloated. But the large scale media and deep interactivity that make desktop browsing so stunning often result in sluggish, clunky, and just plain unacceptable situations on a smart phone.

The age of template websites is upon us. I’m not talking about Wix or SquareSpace or your other run of the mill starter website builders, which are designed to launch your sister’s kitten mittens boutique. I’m referring to template website platforms that are built with lead generation and lead nurturing in mind.

Thinking about a new company website project and have high expectations for how quickly it’s going to get launched? There are many factors that play into how quickly your site will go from idea to live, but a solid process to get you from point A to point B surely helps. To make sure you can hit your timeline goals, make sure to avoid these 5 sure-fire ways to de-rail your website project: