Nexxtep has been around for about 13 years, and in that time, we have redesigned our website 5 times. I have been here about half that time and worked on 3 of those redesigns, including the latest one that you’re looking at now.
If you do the math, we redesign our website about every 3 years.
Why change things up so often?
Being techies by nature, we are always eager to test out the latest shiny new gadgets. Besides, if we are going to offer web design services to our clients, we need to stay at the forefront of web design trends and technologies.
More and more often, I found myself saying, “I wish I could do this with our website.” Or, “I wish our site was more X.” (where X is mobile responsive, dynamic, interactive, and a host of other features I coveted from other, cooler websites). This was the mindset that brought about this redesign and all the redesigns that came before it.
Now we have a website that our team is smitten with. Sure, this will probably change in a couple of years as new trends emerge, but that’s part of the fun. Working in the tech industry means that things are constantly changing, and we get to be a part of it.
What’s new at nexxtep.com? Let’s take a tour…
Simplified
Here are a few things we did to simplify.
- Reduced top menu items (e.g.- “Home,” “Services,” and their dropdowns) by half
- Simplified our services hierarchy into three sections:
- IT Services
- Software Development
- Online Marketing
- Rewrote and shortened copy and used images to convey a message whenever possible
Instead of migrating all of our content over to a new design, we rewrote and reorganized everything from scratch. With our last website, I made the mistake of writing as much as I could possibly think of about each and every one of our service offerings. I did this in an effort to make search engines happy, but the information overload did not make our visitors happy. The increasing bounce rates taught me an important lesson: your visitors (the living, breathing people who come to your website) should always come first. Incidentally, if you design a website to make your visitors happy, Google will eventually reward you.
Tools and Resources
If you have ever called our office, chances are you have heard Mandy’s friendly voice over the phone. Now you can chat with her right here on our website too! Need an update on your service request status? Want to learn more about a service we offer? She’s right here in the bottom corner ready to answer your questions.
We also added a Resources section with our latest eBooks, webinars and offers. We have been producing educational content for years, but never had an easy way to organize it on our website. Now we do, and we plan to update this section often.
A Design that Will Grow with Us
We added color, simplified our page layouts and incorporated more dynamic content to our website in this redesign.
Although our last website was mobile responsive, I kept a “mobile-first” mindset with this version. Over the last few months, you could often find me staring down at my phone if you dropped by my office. No, I wasn’t checking Facebook (well, not MOST of the time anyway), but rather using my phone to test out the new website. Mobile-responsive is now must-have feature for websites, as Google will start rewarding “mobile-friendly” websites (and perhaps punish websites that aren’t mobile-friendly) starting on April 21st.
Our work here is not finished. We plan to tweak and improve this website over the next few months and add even more features. We hope you will come back and see us often, and we welcome your feedback in the comments section or here.
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