What You Need to Know Before Redesigning Your Website
There so many elements to effective marketing, it’s hard to keep everything in mind!
Your website in many cases is where your potential customer makes their decision whether they want to have business with you or not. Moreover, how well your website is optimized often decides whether they are going to find you in the first place.
The design of your website plays a major role in the overall impression of your visitors. Increasingly more people use mobile devices for online browsing, so if your website is not optimized for smartphones you can hardly see it do well in the stats.
If you haven’t updated or changed anything about your website in a couple of years, well, it’s about the right time to do it now!
Here are some things that you need to consider before you are going to start to develop your site.
Why do you need redesigning?
You can have quite a simple reasoning, like wanting to make your site look fresh for 2020. Probably, when you wanted to create corporate website in 2018, there were different standards and requirements back then! So it’s not very inspiring to look at the outdated designs and lack of potentially useful features and call-to-actions.
But don’t you care about your customers at least a bit?
Don’t you think that your design should provide your customers with an exceptional experience while using your website?
Are you satisfied with the current results and stats you are seeing? Don’t want to make sure that the design of your website helps you achieve your goals?
These are much more solid reasons for you to start redesigning your site. Also they both suggest certain aspects of improvement.
So, overall, it would be fair to say that your website should serve your customers in the best way possible and help you achieve your financial goals providing visible measurements of the success.
Now, when you have that in mind, let’s dive into the tips and ideas for your website development.
Conversion rate optimization
In some cases your site doesn’t need a full makeover, a couple of changes might be just enough to get the most of it.
Adding CTAs that would be useful for customers or reviewing them is a good place to start. Different stages of your customer’s journey require different call-to-action buttons.
For example, at the early stage when customers are only getting to know your brand or products they are hardly craving for direct communication with a salesperson. But having some useful and relevant information, cases, and links to resources is the way to go.
Making you look like a resource is a great strategy. It will elevate trust and inspire them to make a purchase from you.
Content offers shouldn’t be focused just on you and your product. Be helpful, be useful. Make sure that your clients learn something from you. And they will turn from visitors into customers.
Adding relevant keywords that your potential customers might want to search, making titles and headlines as well as adding visuals that will work for you is essential if you want to increase your website’s conversion rate.
Don’t forget about SEO
About 89% of prospects use a search engine at the beginning of their buying process, the research has shown. What does it mean for us?
It means that search engine optimization is crucial for attracting customers.
You can find out more about SEO on our website, or here are just a few tips that can be helpful in the beginning:
- work on mobile optimization;
- increase the speed of your website;
- research keywords and use them smartly;
- check the accuracy of your contacts;
- set up your profile on Google My Business;
If your website doesn’t appear at the first couple of pages of search results, then most of your potential clients might not even find you. Working on your search optimization can help a lot.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendliness should be your priority not just for the sake of good search rankings, but also because we are all using smartphones a LOT.
If your site doesn’t look good on mobiles, then the chances are you are losing your prospects.
Creating a responsive website is the way to go on this front. Responsive web design will ensure that your site looks attractive on small and large screens and that your visitors are having a great experience using it on whatever devices they prefer. You might want to make sure that your texts are readable for all devices, and no pages require horizontal scrolling.
How should you approach redesigning your website?
One shouldn’t expect this process to be a one-day task. It requires considerable research and well-thought-through efforts.
Based on our experience, we will recommend starting with the website audit. You and the agency or team you are working with need to have a clear picture of your website, its features, marketing tools presently in use, current stats and analytics.
It’s important to review the website’s content and how well it matches and serves your objectives. The next step would be to trace the buyer’s journey on your website and see how effective it is on every stage.
Process
When you became more or less clear about what you want and why it’s time for the actual redesign process to take place.
We and our team in the Top.Studio while working to create custom made website usually have four stages:
- Building a strategy;
- Design;
- Search engine optimization and development;
- Improvements;
Strategy
The early steps of the process include getting to know you and your values and preferences. We need to create a strategy and set future goals for your website.
If you have analyzed the stats and rates of your site prior to this first stage, we will be basing the goals on this analytical data. We need to find the current weaknesses of your website, basically, where it fails to attract and transform a visitor into your customer.
It’s good to have made a website audit, as it includes some essential information necessary for our redesign process. Very early on, we need to discuss the sitemap and all the functions and features you want to see. The scope of your website will impact the cost of the work of our team. Marketers will help to finalize the vision of your website and create a sitemap before other professionals can start the design and development processes. The final website should correspond with your goals and help you achieve growth.
Design
Now we need to discuss the important aspects of your design such as color pallets, fonts, and page structures. After some discussion and recommendations from our team, we will start fleshing out your vision. Our goal is to create a unique web design that will ensure an exceptional experience of your customers while interacting with your site.
Before moving to the next stages we need your approval in order to see that we understand each other well and are actually meeting your preferences.
When the design is done the mockups will be given to developers.
SEO and development
Now, custom design has to be inserted in your platform and programmed to work and appear properly. To make sure that all of your site functions are working properly and in accordance with the new sitemap, a lot of coding work needs to be done. This is not a very fast process, especially when your website needs to be able to support many features.
We will progress giving you chance to revise as soon as possible.
Simultaneously, our marketers will make sure that every page, content, or image is optimized. We will work carefully to make sure that your website gets the highest rankings possible in search engine results.
Improvement
When we are almost done, you need to carefully go through your website to check any errors or places that need some finishing touches. A website is such a complex structure with many branches, so even though we try our best to give the best results, in reality, there will be some places needing correction. It will be humans, not machines working on your website, so together with you, we will need to revise the site a few times before we can launch it.
And what’s now?
Well, it depends on who you are working with and what kind of agreement you have with them. In some cases, the team will be in contact for some time to check the site’s performance and improve it with all the means available and correct problems as you notice them.
