One of my very first childhood memories comes from watching Hee Haw with my parents. The down-home comedienne on screen was engaged in some seventies-style suggestive banter with Buck Owens. At one point, she said to him, “Buck, do you know what you get when you put lipstick on a pig?” Buck said no, and with a saucy grin, the comedienne replied, “A pig wearing lipstick!”

You may think this has absolutely nothing to do with web design and digital marketing. But you’d be wrong, and here’s why: the web isn’t exactly a new marketing platform anymore. Businesses have known that they need a website for a long, long time – and in many instances, they’ve actually had a website for several years.

Some of these websites were heinously expensive when they were built. Meanwhile, they’ve delivered a kind of mixed bag in terms of results. The web has evolved dramatically over the last fifteen years, but business owners who have already spent thousands of dollars don’t want to abandon the less-than-functional websites they have now. They ask developers to update the look and functionality of their website, but they don’t want to spend any more time on the infrastructure that supports what the customer actually sees and engages with.

This is the digital equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. If your website is outdated, there may be things your developer can do to work around its limitations on its appearance and functionality, but at the end of the day? Those limitations are still there. Your website may be similar in appearance to contemporary sites, but it won’t have the ability to handle the demands today’s customers will put on it. Eventually, slow load times and an inability to display and function well on mobile devices will render your website effectively obsolete: your customers won’t bother visiting it – or you!

Luckily, there are alternatives to putting lipstick on a pig. The prices on attractive, fully functional, mobile-ready websites have come down tremendously. You can now invest in a website built with best practices that will actually help you achieve your business goals such as attracting more customers, building your company’s brand name, and driving sales. Find out more here.

Also? Some pretty serious surveys have been done, and it turns out pigs don’t even LIKE wearing lipstick! Save your Max Factor for someone who appreciates it.