In “Thinking About Websites: Every Page is Your Home Page,” you saw the reasons your website is your face to the world. We are a world of searchers, which usually sets us on a path to search engines that lead to websites. When we land on a website, first impressions count. If the site is hard to understand, difficult to navigate or fails the test of being phone-friendly or tablet-friendly, we move on. That might mean we are missing the perfect solution to our search, but if you make it hard, people move on.

To take the temperature of your website, consider doing the same type of assessment you might do for your workflow when it’s time to optimize. A website assessment is more than a quick look at the home page. It is a careful review of the architecture of the website, identification of branding and theme anomalies, and deep dives into where links go and what they present. It is a look at the programming, tagging, and outward user experience.

If you are the proprietor of a printing company, or you have responsibility for the branding and marketing, you may not be the web programming expert in your organization. You may have contracted a partner to develop your website or relied on some of your talented staff to get it built and visible. Whatever the circumstances were when it was built, and no matter how recently or long ago it was, 2023 is a great year to do a deep-dive into the user experience of coming to your website.