Your website is a window into your organization. In today's world, if what your clients see through the window might not exactly reflect what your company is to the world, it might be time to consider cloning or upgrading your site. Cloning a website is for those who like their outward appearance but they might have difficulty changing what the prospective client sees because they really don't have easy, or direct access to be able to make those changes on the web.

Cloning your website offers several advantages without requiring the need for a complete design overhaul. There are many reasons you might want to do it. It may have been hacked. In this case, it's very likely we can recover the website look and feel BEFORE it was hacked. You might like the design but you can't log into the site and make changes very easily... or you might be afraid of just messing it up!

Here are the most obvious benefits to cloning your website.

ADD EDITING CAPABILITY

Cloning your website onto a content management platform will provide you access to what your website should have been all along...a living, breathing document. A cloned site on a brand new content management system will give the website owner easy access to:

1. Add Video
2. Change Text
3. Change Images
4. Change the Navigation
5. Add New Products and Services
6. Delete Obsolete Products and Services
7. Freshen up the content without requiring a developer to make the changes

MAKE THE SITE PHONE FRIENDLY

Keeping the design you have but making the website phone friendly (responsive) can improve your search engine exposure. If your site does not pass the Google phone friendly test, you should at the very least consider upgrading (cloning) to make the website responsive. Google will diminish your search results relative to your competition if their websites are phone friendly and your site is not. (Click>> Test your site using Google's Phone Friendly test).

ADD MARKETING CAPABILITY

New website technologies separate the design from the content so you can easily edit the content without changing your branding. Access to common search engine optimization features becomes simple even for the end user; you don't need a programmer to edit the page metatags. Specifically, the page titles, the page descriptions and the page keywords are all accessible and changeable in newer website technology.

Along with that, you can easily change your copyright to this year.!

More importantly, a good website application is extensible much like your phone is. Adding applications to the back-end can significantly improve your marketing capability. Add a form to your contact page for example. But beyond that, why not automatically keep a list of contacts of everyone who has ever contact you via that form. And beyond that, why not have a way to communicate to them in the future. Here are some examples:

1. Blog Announcements. Every time the blog is entered, an email gets kicked out to your contact and client list informing them of the same information. (It could be specials, company updates whatever). Oh wait... you don't have a blog. That's another reason to clone. It can easily be added!
2. Blog Newsletters. You always wanted a newsletter but didn't have the time. What if you wrote a blog (which you should be doing) and after every x number of blogs, a newsletter was automatically created? And that newsletter was sent out automatically to a predefined list of customers and prospects?
   
   
3. Email Marketing built right into the website platform.
   
   
4. Add forms that allow visitors to easily contact you. Add live chat (not for everyone, but it's great for some). Add surveys. Add follow-up email campaigns. Add calendars, events, job boards etc. The message is simple. Your website is more than your company brochure. It's a marketing platform. Take advantage of it.
   
   
5. And of course, add the ability to insert video, graphics, and galleries without involving a programmer or web site developer. You should be able to do it as simply as you write a letter in Microsoft Word.

And the question I always get asked is how much? Is it really worth it if I'm not changing the design look and feel. We think it is and the cost of building a new site around an existing design is about 5 times less than if you want to redesign the site. Graphic design is well worth the investment when you're ready for it. But it is also a significant chunk of the cost associated with a new website. If you just want functionality, performance, and ease of use, consider cloning. And by the way, if you clone first and then consider changing the design look and feel, that too becomes cheaper because the cloning process has separated the site design from the site content.