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Website Redesign

Is Your Website Impacting Company Sales?

Did you know that poor web design can hurt conversions and sales? An unattractive site deserves a website redesign.

No matter what your company size or industry is, though, it’s crucial that you take a strategic approach to your website redesign. Know what isn’t working, what does currently work, and what goals you wish to achieve.

Otherwise, how will you take advantage of your existing web traffic? Worse, what happens if your web design is causing people to avoid visiting your site at all?

Let’s look at some of the techniques for creating a website redesign strategy and implementing it for maximum ROI.

How Do You Know if Your Website Needs a Redesign?

If you can answer yes to any of those questions, a website redesign is necessary.

1.    Does the design look outdated?

2.    Are my conversions/sales decreasing?

3.    Have I received complaints about user experience or design-related issues?

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Website Redesign Steps

We’ve personally worked on many website redesign projects and here is what we learned to be useful. There are various areas needed to be covered in the website project  We’ll go through each in detail below. But first, we start with the ‘website kickoff meeting’ where we go over your goals for the project, understand who is coming to the site, how they got there and agree on a basic timeline for the project.

Kick Off Meeting

1. Establish Goals

You want to establish your goals for the project. What does winning look like? A question I like to ask my clients is: “Imagine it’s 6 months after the new website has been launched, and you are feeling totally happy with your new website and the whole process of building it. What has to have happened for you to feel that way?”

2. Getting Traffic 

How are people currently coming to the website? A lot of times the client will say “their not!” but usually that’s not true. Just because you don’t get a lot of traffic from Google doesn’t mean people aren’t coming to your website. Is your website a lead generating tool or a lead conversion tool?

3. Timelines 

When it comes to timelines, I would focus more on the overall process than a specific timeline. The best piece of advice I would give in terms of timing is to get your content in order. The content is the bottleneck to all projects. So make sure you have someone dedicated to the part of the project.

Content Phase

 

The content phase is where most people go wrong and wind up paving streets over cow paths. With that being said, you definitely don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and not use the existing content from your current website. Our process seeks to look at your website with fresh eyes while leveraging all of your existing collateral.

Sitemap

The sitemap is your website’s structure. It is a map of all of the pages on the website and how they all relate to each other. I like to think of it as the skeleton upon which the body of your website lives.

Current Sitemap

The first thing you should do is take your current sitemap and list it out. We do this on a Google Sheet. You want to take inventory of all of the pages along with the corresponding URLs so that you can set up redirects with the new site.

Google Analytics

We then like to do an audit of the client’s Google Analytics to see how users are currently interacting with your website and gain insights based on current user behavior.

New Sitemap

Then we establish the new sitemap based on our findings. This includes adding new pages that didn’t exist before. Removing or consolidating unnecessary pages. And restructuring or renaming any pages as needed.

Content Pull

We make this easier by ‘pulling’ all of the content from the current website and putting them into a series of Google Docs. I like using Google Docs because it works as a central repository for all the website content and there are no issues with version control as you always have the latest version of the content available. Whatever you do, be sure to have a centralized and shared environment for the website content, or bad things will happen. Believe me.

Imagery

We use Google Drive for sharing imagery as well. I recommend setting up a series of Google Drive folders that mirror the new website sitemap and drop in all images into the correct folder.

How is that possible?

Well, you want to start with the sitemap, which will outline all of the pages of the site. Then you want to work on the homepage structure. In many ways, the homepage is just a picture of your website’s sitemap.

 

Design Phase

 

So here’s the big problem with website redesign projects. There is a bit of a chicken and the egg thing going on with the design and the content. Do you want to do the content first, or the design first? The truth is you kind of need to do both.

Design Mockups

We work using design mockups. Mockups are basically an exact picture of what the website will look like. We do this using Photoshop. Here is a pro tip. If your website designer doesn’t give you mockups but presents you with a functioning website right away, they are working with a premade template.

Fonts

Fonts are probably the most overlooked and underrated aspect of your website. 80-90% of most websites is text and having a good understanding of fonts will have a huge impact on your design. Some general rules when it comes to fonts are to have no more than 2 font styles total for your project, with no more than 2-3 alignments total on a page. When it comes to fonts, less is more.

A great place to find fonts is Google Fonts.

If you find a font you really like, you can use a tool like WhatTheFont to identify any font being used.

Colors

As a general rule, the difference between a poorly designed website and a professionally designed one is the poorly designed site does too many things. And that is definitely true when it comes to color. You want about 2-3 primary colors with 2-3 accent colors, maximum. Be sure your colors are highly contrasted. You can use a contrast checker to be sure.

Imagery

Most people think they hate stock imagery. The truth is, they just hate the cliched stock imagery of two people in suits shaking hands. That type of thing.

Page Templates

One of the hardest concepts to explain to a client is that of website page templates. The basic idea is that not every page of your website will be a unique slow flake. Many of them will follow the same structure and layout and those are called page templates. One of the main ways we scope a website project has to do with the total number of page templates for the site. The main takeaway is, the more you want each page of the site to be unique and different, the more expensive and time-intensive the project will be.

While launching a new website might not be quite as complex as flying a plane, there are enough variables to warrant a thorough checklist with each launch.

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Website Redesign Checklist

Hosting Credentials

Your domain registrar and hosting environment are two separate entities that work together to support your website displaying on the web. With a website redesign, you will have both already in place. And you will need to have a clear understanding of your current hosting setup. Will it remain the same or if you will be pointing to a new environment? You will also want to make sure that you share the proper credentials with whoever is launching your new website.

Email

Email hosting is a separate entity than your website hosting. If you are launching your new website in the same hosting environment, this won’t be an issue. If you are launching your new website on a new hosting environment, you want to make sure you do not mess up your existing email hosting records in the process. A good rule of thumb is that if you are only changing your A Record, you won’t be messing up the existing email setup. If you are changing the actual Nameservers, you will be impacting the existing email setup and you will need a technical person to help you make sure that the MX records of the new host match the existing MX records.

Backup Existing Website

If you are keeping your current hosting environment, then you will probably want to backup your previous website by moving it to an archive folder, e.g. www.yourdomain.com/archive. The trick with this is you want to make sure to have your developer de-index this folder so that Google can no longer crawl it or display its pages in the search results. If you are using a new hosting environment, then you can backup the previous site in a zipped folder and save it to your computer for safekeeping.

Google Analytics

You’ll want to make sure you have Google Analytics running on the new website. This is something you can do on the test site pre-launch. A bonus tip for Google Analytics is to add a note within your Google Analytics at the date of your launch to keep track of your new website’s results.

Discourage Search Engines

If you have a WordPress website, pay close attention. By default, when building a test site, WordPress will ‘discourage’ the site from being indexed by Google. This is a good thing during the development phase because you don’t want Google indexing your test site. But as soon as it launches, you want to make sure to undo this function. Go to Dashboard > Settings > Reading and uncheck the “discourage Search Engines” checkbox.


Need help with your website redesign? Contact Acquaint today via email at info@acqauint.co.za and we’ll help make your website Redesign a great success for you and your business.

Sources : thomasdigital ; crazyegg.com