The web continues to evolve and goes through fast changes. This indicates that you will need to update your website at some point. Approach website redesigns strategically regardless of your company’s size or industry. Be aware of what is trending, what is not, and the objectives you intend to accomplish in the future.
Customer preferences, browser technologies, and accessibility requirements are continually changing. What worked when you started may not be as effective a year later. Thus, you’ll need to keep track of your customers’ wants and needs; after all, you’re developing the website for them. If this sounds difficult, you can, fortunately, hire a professional web designer like Smartly Done and others to redesign the site for you.
Why Should Your Website Be Redesigned?
Your company’s website needs redesign for many reasons. The most common reasons are as follows:
- Because it is outdated, your website does not accurately describe the quality of the products or services you offer.
- Your website’s content isn’t SEO-friendly.
- You’ve rebranded and must update your website.
- Your company has undergone significant growth and transformation since it was first developed.
- Mobile browsing accounts for more than 50% of all traffic that comes to your website. Your present website does not support mobile devices, making navigation extremely difficult for phone or tablet users.
- Sharing features for networking sites are not currently available on your website.
- Your website has a high bounce rate, indicating that visitors are not interested in browsing or checking out what you have to offer.
Understand What Your Internal Team Needs
Your internal team members have needs, suggestions, and concepts for designs that have to be listened to so their message reaches you and you hear what they say.
Thus, before you launch the new website, it’s vital to gain the support of all divisions inside the company. This is not a simple task, so testing and refining are needed to allow site revisions after launch.
Any company wishing to showcase its products and services online must have a professional, well-designed website. Check out these tips for planning and implementing a website redesign strategy:
- Define Your Branding
Be clear on your desired branding, messaging, and value proposition before designing and editing your website. This ensures webpage consistency.
First-time visitors to your website should understand what you do, how it benefits them, and why they should stay and not go to your competitors to get the information they need.
Consider adjusting your branding or messaging, if needed. Use clear, simple, and direct language when writing. Industry jargon may annoy your audiences, so avoid such terms.
Consider what visual components of your website need to be changed as you create your company’s identity.
- Redesign With Data
User research drives UX, like branding. Google Analytics and heatmap tools can help you find places that need rethinking or missing functionalities.
Analytics will give you everything you need to know about your users: how much time they’re spending on various web pages, if they’re converting, where they’re dropping out of the conversion flow, what devices they use, where they’re from, user demographics, behavior flow, etc.
If you have many mobile visitors to a conversion page on your website, you may want to incorporate calls to action that stand out on mobile touchscreen devices.
Analytic data are interpretable, but they’re also an objective source of information that can assist your team in knowing how your website is used and drives project planning. If you don’t have a strong hold on your web analytics, perform an analytics review to find user trends. This will let you build a benchmark against which to measure future website performance.
- Know Your Target Audience
Even if your website has the best user interface, it won’t function well if its design doesn’t match those who visit it. Hence, understanding one’s target audience is essential to one’s success.
Who’s visiting your site? This is another thing you can discover from web analytics and may help guide your redesign. If you’re trying to sell products to women over 60, yet most of your site visitors are men between 18 and 24, you have an advertising and targeting problem. Thus, ensure you update the content when you redesign to better target audiences.
- Optimize For SEO
An effective search engine optimization (SEO) plan will continually draw in new visitors. Google considers keywords, link juice, and social signals.
You must conduct keyword research to find page-specific keywords. Use these keywords naturally in titles, headings, page content, anchor text, alt image tags, HTML tags, meta tags, and title tags. Promoting and linking to your website’s content on social media, submitting it to local directories, and writing guest posts generate external links. Social signals are earned when people like, share, or comment on your content.
Redesigning a website affects SEO in the following ways:
- Without SEO, a site redesign can lose traffic and sales. SEO improves your site for users and search engines, helping customers find you on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
- Even if your website is one of the most attractively built, people won’t find it easily without SEO. Therefore, SEO is crucial for a website redesign.
Moreover, you have to set your SEO goals when redesigning your website. Want to boost keyword rankings by 10% this year? Want to double monthly visitors? Do you want organic traffic to outnumber your paid ones?
Make these goals clear, measurable, and realistic to increase the likelihood that your redesign project will be successful and guarantee it is in line with your entire marketing plan.
- Choose The Right Website Software
Choosing the best software for a business website might be confusing due to the ever-changing software market. So, how do you choose from among the many software options?
Two key advancements have influenced website software solutions today:
- Content Management Systems (CMS). Web pages were hand-built in the beginning. Each page’s HTML code was assembled into files. Changing content also required fiddling with code, so it’s a time-consuming task. However, CMS has evolved and expanded since then.
CMSs divide code and content. This gives you an interface to easily update your website as your business expands.
- Open Source And Proprietary Software. Choosing proprietary software was once a concern. Open-source software has transformed information technology, thereby increasing choices. Hence, before choosing software, decide if you want proprietary or open-source.
Linux is a popular open-source operating system (OS). It has produced Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and more. This software is free to install and modify, making it a versatile OS for tech-savvy users.
The Windows operating system is probably the most well-known example of a piece of proprietary software. As proprietary software, it needs payment, and the source code can’t be duplicated or modified.
- Declutter Your Website
The practice of minimalism has never harmed anyone. Besides, maximalism is a design that irritates users the most in the digital world. You do not want your newly redesigned website to feature web pages overloaded with an excessive number of texts or images.
Even if you are not a minimalist, it is easy to understand that a website with fewer overlapping features will result in less confusion for its visitors.
To achieve the desired appearance, choose a few typefaces and apply them in various sizes throughout a page. Achieve a professional look by paying attention to seemingly little aspects such as shadows, color palettes, gradients, and highlights.
- Don’t Forget Social Media Integration
Before launching your new design, optimize your site for social media because that is where most of your referral traffic likely comes.
Here are several indicators your redesign is integrated with social media:
- Each of your pages should be presented professionally when posted on social media. When you share a link from your website, the appropriate thumbnail photos, headlines, and descriptions will be displayed when the link is shared.
- It should be simple for site visitors to navigate over to your various social media pages from your website. They won’t have to waste time looking for the correct account to follow. Your social media links don’t need to be the focal point of your redesign, but they should be easy to reach from any page on your site.
- There must be an easy and automated way to share blog posts on social media. You may consider social media management tools to help you with that.
FAQs
How Much Does A Website Redesign Cost?
Website redesign costs between USD$3,000 and USD$65,000. The cost depends on size and functionality. The price may be affected by factors unique to your web design agency, such as their level of experience, available resources, and the deadline.
How Should A Design Project For A Website Be Managed?
Find a web design team you are confident in and at ease working with, and then get into a business partnership with them. Redesigning a website is a difficult process that experts should manage, but you must be involved to guarantee that the result lives up to your expectations.
Conclusion
In today’s digital age, having a website that is not up to date in terms of its design will reflect poorly on your company. It would be beneficial if you explored more about website redesign to determine your options.
