I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve landed on a website and felt like I just stepped out of a DeLorean straight into the early 2010s. Do you know those cluttered layouts, stock photos of businesspeople shaking hands, neon-colored buttons screaming for attention, and navigation menus that make you work harder than your first internship?
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At Above Bits, we’ve been helping businesses update their web presence for nearly two decades, and let me tell you: many websites are still stuck in the past. It’s a problem we see repeatedly in website design in Charlotte, where local businesses rely on their digital presence to bring in customers. But when that digital presence looks like it hasn’t been touched since the days of the iPhone 4, it’s not doing them any favors.
What’s more interesting is that it’s not just small businesses making this mistake. Even global giants have had their fair share of embarrassing web design blunders. So today, let’s take a trip back in time, look at why some websites are still living in 2010, and—most importantly—figure out how to fix it before customers start running for the hills.
How Websites Got Stuck in 2010
When you think of 2010, a few things might come to mind—Angry Birds, the first iPad, and Facebook are still fun. It was a simpler time, and it was an era of experimentation for the web. Businesses had just started taking online presence seriously, and designers were playing with trends that, at the time, seemed revolutionary.