When you’re updating a website, you want to go beyond just making it look different. In fact, updating a website is one of the best opportunities that you’ll ever have to ascertain what your visitors really want. You may want to consider adding some features if you have an outdated and overly simple site and, by adding these features, you can give a lot of value to your visitors. Not all of these features are particularly expensive to add and a good web designer can usually find very creative ways to do it.

Social Networking Integration
Social networking – also called social media – seems to be here to stay at this point. Everybody’s accustomed to it and, for the vast majority of users, social media does play some part in their life. Integrating social networking into your website can be a great way to make your website more useful, particularly if you regularly add new content to your website.

One of the easiest ways for you to integrate social media into your website is to add icons to the bottom of your blog posts. These icons make it easier for your visitors to share your blog posts on their social media feeds, which can increase your traffic and, of course, help you get your message out.

Membership Sections
Interactivity is a big part of successfully marketing a website. The best website designs out there tend to engage users in one way or another, oftentimes by allowing them to have some sort of a profile on that site.

Adding a membership section to the website is not particularly difficult these days. For some businesses, this may be enormously useful. For example, if you manufacture a product that requires you to provide user support documentation, you could set up a membership section and allow people to keep track of their warranty information, get user support documents, look at user forums and post questions to them and so forth.

One of the ways that this makes life better for users is that it acts as something of a natural filter for website sections such as public forums. The vast majority of the people who go through the trouble to sign up for a membership will be those who actually have a product that your company manufactures, which means that your forums won’t be at as high of a risk of being spammed.

Video and Audio
Multimedia content is probably one of the most underutilized resources that website owners have. There’s plenty of websites out there with a lot of multimedia content, but a lot of that content is just bland advertising. You can do better.

Adding instructional videos and audio files for your visitors is a great way to keep them interested in your website. It also does a lot for your branding. When the people who purchase your products know that they don’t have to search Google to find information on how to troubleshoot or fix them, it makes your company look good. It also keeps people coming back to your site, which gives you opportunities to advertise new products to them.

Adding features is a great way to improve the quality of your website overall. If you’re working with a good website designer, they’ll likely have some great ideas for you that will help you understand what people want out of websites these days and will also help you to understand how you can go about providing that experience. It’s a great way to update your website in a very substantive and meaningful way that will keep people coming back.

Matt Dandurand is the CEO of MediaContour.com, offering web design in Los Angeles, CA.