A poor website design can have a negative impact on your conversions and sales. If you think that you have an unattractive website, it is best that you get a redesign as soon as possible.
Regardless of the industry you work in or the size of your company, having a strategic approach to website redesign is of paramount importance. This includes knowing what currently works, what isn’t working, and what goals you want to achieve. This will help you take advantage of the current traffic on your website. Let’s get into some tips that will help you create the perfect website redesign strategy for you:
1. Know your target audience
It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on getting the best UI for your website. If the design isn’t complementing your visitors, your website won’t perform. In order to ensure the success of your website, you have to consider customer insight. After all, the whole reason to build a website is so that your customers can find you on the internet and make a purchase. For instance, if you have a clothing brand, you should be focused on creating a photo-centric website. If you are not able to highlight your offerings, you won’t be able to sell many clothes. For news blogs, you will need a format that caters to avid readers.
2. Analyze your website
Before you can make improvements and fix the layout, you need to identify the problematic areas on your website. You have to audit your website and make a list of all the changes that are required. Through your analysis, you will be able to get answers on what exactly is wrong with your website, what makes it unattractive, and others. This will help you prioritize the elements that you have to focus on and exclude the ones that you don’t want to revamp.
3. Define your goals
Each of the items that you have decided to revamp must have a reason behind them. For example, if you want to change your navigation bar, you must have a reason for it. Your users might not be able to find the content they want and you want them to locate information faster. If there are some items on your list without any associated reason or goal, put a star next to them so that you can remember to test them. It is best to focus on data-based changes as it can help you know the exact improvements you have been able to make through your website redesign.
4. Plan your budget
More often than not, businesses underestimate how much the website redesign will cost them. If you don’t want to set yourself up failure, you need to understand every single cost that is associated with the redesign:
- Planning
- Design
- Website development
- Copywriting
- SEO setup
- Image/Video production
- Hosting
- Project management
- Launch
- Quality Assurance testing
Depending on your website, business, and industry, you might have different needs. But, you have to make sure that you don’t have an extremely low budget, or else your website will suffer.
5. Create action trackers
In order to make sure that you complete the tasks within deadlines, you can work on creating action trackers for every page that you are redesigning. For this, you can use the current site map. If you have 5-10 pages on your website, a document with multiple tabs will do the job. But, if you have more pages, it is best that you create different documents for different pages that cover the goals you have for those pages. You can rename the columns with page-specific tasks, target delivery date, date completed, and person responsible. This setup will ensure that you don’t lose your momentum.
6. Track everything
Everything that you have on your website should be measurable. This includes incoming traffic, bounce rates, leads, sales, revenue, and more. There are several tools available online that can help you track, analyze, and measure your metrics. Some of the most important metrics that you need for your website are unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, organic search traffic, direct traffic, load speed, and referral sites.
It is important to remember that your website is not an online catalog for your business. Instead, it is one of the most important marketing tools you can use. You have to keep up with the latest trends and updates and incorporate them into your website. With the above-mentioned website redesign tips, you will be able to use your website to get ahead of your competition.
Tracy is the Design Manager here at Redwood Creative. She’s been designing amazing graphics and web layouts for large and small businesses for upwards of 7 years.
