Ensuring a Successful Website Redesign
There are many good reasons to redesign your website.
- You may want a redesign because your site design is outdated, or the site doesn’t reflect your current business.
- Perhaps you want your website to incorporate more modern technology, to improve performance and appearance in modern browsers and across multiple devices.
- If your old website is difficult to update and edit because it’s on an obsolete or proprietary Content Management System, that’s a good reason to update.
- Or your site might be coded with static HTML, which means updates are a real nuisance.
You also may want to elevate your website’s marketing performance, turning it into a better tool for lead generation and sales.
Whatever your reasons for wanting a new website, we can help make the process fun and successful. (No kidding!) Just follow these ten best practices for website redesigns:
Planning
Clear Objectives
Competitive Analysis
Current Status
Clear Responsibilities
Be very clear about how and by whom decisions will be made. While we do recommend asking for feedback and opinions, we don’t recommend decision by committee. Someone in your company should be empowered to make each necessary decision. If the project is large and complex, consider a shared approval matrix, in which each specific area — such as design, content, navigation, features, and technology — is assigned appropriate reviewers, commenters, and decision maker. If your circumstances call for shared decision authority, AUMW can help you create an approval matrix. We also recommend avoiding decisions based purely on personal preferences. “I like green,” for example, is not a good foundation for an important business decision like a website redesign. We’ill do our best to get to know you and your organization and to create a website that you’re proud of, one that you feel reflects your brand and culture. Remember, your website is for your customer, not for you. That means your subjective feelings about the design are secondary. What’s primary is that your current or potential customers respond positively to your website and its content, that they find the site easy to use, and that they get what they want from it. Approvals should be based on how well the design elements and content meet customer needs and fulfill your business goals. Do they support your brand identity? Do they promote your company’s message clearly and effectively? We’ll make sure they do.
Determine Audience
Prepare Materials
Technology
Solid Foundation
Be Social
Keep in mind that your website is a key element in a broader system. We’re talking about your other online presences: social media pages, email marketing, and any other communication channels you use to connect to customers or track them. Make sure you include all of these in your planning.
Responsive Design
Remember: a large and growing proportion of all website visitors rely on mobile devices (e.g. smart phones and tablets). That’s why we recommend responsive, HTML5/CSS3 themes, which can eliminate the need to develop a new site for new mobile devices. Sticking with a strong framework such as Genesis, your site’s theme can be upgraded into the future as needed, without expensive rework and reorganization of your content.
Ongoing
Plan Updates
Last but not least: plan for regular, consistent content updates to your website. A site that isn’t updated regularly won’t rank well on search engine results pages. And it won’t appeal to customers. Your website should be at the active center of a vibrant content marketing strategy. (That’s assuming you want to attract and retain lots visitors looking for your product or services.) We can help you create both that strategy, and a content plan that will give you and your team a clear path ahead. We’re also here to provide professional assistance creating new content, monitoring your progress, and helping to adjust your content plan for better performance over time.
Conclusion
By following these steps, and remembering that continuous improvement is your goal, you’ll be rewarded with a web marketing tool that will yield valuable returns on your investment.
- Clear Objectives. Clarify and document your goals for the new website.
- Clear Responsibilities. Decide ahead of time how and by whom decisions will be made.
- Competitive Analysis. Look at your competition, but don’t plan to copy them.
- Determine Audience. Create accurate personas of your target audience.
- Current Status. Document where you are now, and where you’re going, with analytics tools.
- Prepare Materials. Organize your content assets, and plan how and by whom the content will be created.
- Be Social. Integrate the new site, from the start, with all of your other online presences and tools.
- Solid Foundation. Build the site on a proven and supported framework and a reliable hosting provider.
- Responsive Design. Use responsive code, so your site will work on the devices of today and tomorrow.
- Plan Updates. Create a content strategy and plan, and begin to work that plan, so the new site stays fresh and yields better and better results over time.
Disclosure: We are a Bluehost affiliate, and receive compensation from this company. We recommend this provider and use them for our own sites. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.