Determine The Goals You Want To Accomplish With Your Website
Your website is your virtual card and it often provides the primary impression of your business to future customers — making it one among the foremost important aspects of your company. A website redesign process can help bring your site to life and engage potential customers. Not only that, but it can even help to convert them if you do everything right.
Before we jump into the website redesign process, it’s important to determine if your website needs a redesign in the first place. After all, why fix something that’s not broken?
Your website probably doesn’t need a redesign if:
- You’ve redesigned it within the last two to three years
- It’s effectively driving leads
- It seems a lot of traffic
- You saw an increase in traffic, leads, and conversions after your previous redesign
- You’re happy with how your website performs
- The functionality works seamlessly
If your website fits these criteria, it’s time to create a website redesign process
- You haven’t redesigned your website in the last five years
- Your logo and branding changed
- The functionality is out of date or doesn’t work
- You’re dissatisfied with traffic, leads, and sales
- Your website isn’t mobile responsive
Typical website redesign process in five steps
- Take a deep dive into your current website
The first step of any website redesign process is to audit your current site. It’s impossible to know just what your website needs if you don’t know what it currently has.
That said, you’ll want to scrub your site from top to bottom — looking for anything from design inconsistencies to broken links. Here’s what you should look for during step one of your website redesign process.
- Broken buttons
- Design inconsistencies
- Places where you need to update your logo
- Non-responsive images
- Beyond that though, there’s one huge step that you must accomplish during your website audit: Checking Google Analytics to see how specific site pages perform.
By looking at the traffic metrics on Google Analytics for your site pages, you can piece together what’s working and what’s not.
For example, if your blog gets hardly any traffic, but your main article pages perform well, you’ll want to ask more questions to figure out why.
Here are some questions you should ask:
- Does your blog have little traffic because of the design?
- What do users click on once they visit your article pages?
- How long do they stay on the page?
- What pages do they look at next?
From there, you can begin to piece together what makes certain pages successful, and what you need to tweak on other pages to make them equally as successful.
- Determine the goals you want to accomplish with your website
Often, the design of your website helps you complete your goals. When users visit your site, they often make a first impression based on organization and functionality — making your design extremely important.
You should take care to redesign your website based on the goals you want to accomplish. For example, if the main goal of your website is to sell products, you should design your website to lead users to your e-commerce pages.
If your goal is just to stay users on your site pages, you ought to design your site with engagement in mind — featuring videos, images, and interactive elements.
When you determine your goals, it’ll help you create a concrete plan for your website design, since your goals determine site elements, functionality, and more.
- Gain inspiration from your competitors
Let’s make it clear up-front that you should never copy your competitors’ designs. However, there is no harm in drawing inspiration from them. After all, they’re your competition for a reason — because you share an equivalent customer base.
Check out what works for other companies in terms of functionality and content.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do they feature a lot of images?
- What kinds of topics do they include in their navigation bar?
- How is their navigation arranged?
- Do they have a blog?
- What functionality do you really like about the website?
Answering these questions helps you gain inspiration for your own site and what elements you’d like to include.
- Create a map of your website hierarchy
Before you start your website redesign, it’ll be helpful to create a hierarchy of your site pages to determine how you’ll classify each of your pages.
You may want to create a different design for sub-pages, and a different design yet for pages within your sub-pages.
For example, if you sell clothing for men, women, and youngsters, you would possibly design a couple of “general” pages about each category. This design will likely be different from the design you use to show off each individual product.
When you create a website hierarchy or a map of your site pages, you’ll be able to determine
How many different designs you need.
- Homepage design
- Contact page design
- About us page design
- Category page design
- Sub-category page design
- Product page design
When you’re running your own business, it’s difficult to think about anything other than doing just that.
That’s why it’s in your best interest to hire a website redesign company that can take care of the process for you. Not only will it take the stress off your shoulders, but you can be certain that the job will be done right.
When you hire a website redesign company, you can rely on them to take care of all the steps we mentioned above — from looking at competitor sites to creating your website hierarchy.
