You don’t want too many modules on the homepage because the scroll rate really drops off. Businesses will often get hung up on the homepage, and while it might be important, people go to the homepage to leave the homepage. There’s no benefit to having a lot of content sitting there.
When we create long homepages to bring “greatness” to the company, often times no one scrolls through them, and they don’t tell you anything about the site visitor. A homepage really serves as a navigation element to bring a user to the specific content they’re looking for. However, once the visitor navigates to a product page, for example, they’re actually showing need; they’re interested in learning what that product can do and are far more likely to scroll down the entire page.
Website migration can be done with the flip of a switch
This comes up because some companies will outsource migration physician database services to low cost and low quality development resources who just “rip and replace” existing code instead of building it from the ground up to best work with a given CMS. Because of the lifetime value of a customer, companies may offer to migrate the site for free with a minimum contract length. There is a lot of effort that goes into those migrations, it’s just done behind the scenes which can undercut the understanding of the complexity of the migration process.
When these low cost contractors migrate websites, their goal is to get the migrated site up and running as soon as possible, so they don’t focus on setting it up for the marketer’s ease of use after the fact. The developers doing the rip and replace don’t necessarily want it to be difficult for marketers to manage the site, that’s just not their first priority nor is it realistic within their working budgets.
When we create a module at New Breed, we break it down into simple things like multiple image and text fields to add a degree of safety rails. There is markup and CSS behind the scenes powering the module to make it styled consistently so over time a marketer doesn’t inadvertently break the formatting. Rip and replace migrations might just take all the generated markup from the old site and dump it into a single rich text field. It’ll look fine and work until someone actually tries updating it, and you won’t have the freedom to customize pages without having to worry about really specific markup and CSS within the content editor.
Such a big part of a website budget is developing the code, doing the QA, flowing the content and launching the site — that’s probably 60% of your whole budget. If you’re going to spend 60% of the cost of a new website, why don’t you audit your website and actually do a redesign that’ll get you better performance? Knowing that for best practices the code and development have to be revisited in a migration, it makes more sense to do a redesign as opposed a straight migration.