Every website needs to be redesigned at some point. Whether it’s a minor redesign, to simply freshen up a well-built but aging site (Which doesn’t take too long these days), or a full-on ground-up rebuild (Which takes a little longer to do it right), website redesign is an absolute necessity.
There are many reasons why we redesign websites for companies, so let’s tave a look at everything you need to know when considering a redesign…
Looking Dated
Every so often a comment comes out of our design studio…
“Looks like it was designed in 1998!”
That may sound like a tough judgement about a website design our team encounters, but that’s our professional experience and commercial honesty shining through.
When you look back over the history of how the web has evolved, a lot has happened in a very short space of time. When I was a web designer, over twenty years ago, we were building websites for VGA (640 x 480) and SVGA (800 x 600) cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors the size of old television sets.
Now, we have LCD screens, often multiple, wrap-around 4K screens, and all the way down to high-resolution (Think Apple Retina display) mobile phone screens, with various tablets and laptop sizes in between.
A web designer’s job is not as simple as it used to be.
Then there’s the whole concept of responsive design – What used to only ever be seen on a desktop twenty years ago is now seen on tablets, mobile phones, and smart TVs. So our design has to respond to the demands of the device it is being viewed on.
For fun, and a trip down memory lane, it’s worth noting that gone also are drop shadows, bevelled buttons, skeuomorphism, flashing gifs, and Adobe Flash intros.
But even though we’ve moved on from such monstrosities of design, technology and trends can make even a recent website look dated. And that’s a very good reason to bring your website into the twenty first century with a redesign.
Business Purpose, Goals, and Objectives
The saying goes that “beauty is only skin deep” and that’s another solid reason to redesign your website.
Quite often a very beautiful website design can initially wow the business and impress the customer. However, once your new site is launched, you can quickly realise that it’s not achieving your business’ goals and objectives.
As a business owner you have to ask yourself:
- What are you hoping to achieve with your website?
If you didn’t ask that of your previous web designer, then, for the sake of your business, you should be asking that now.
Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, boost sales, or improve user engagement – These are all valid goals that need to be reflected in your next website redesign.
And what about your target audience?
- Who are they?
- What do they need?
- What are their expectations when surfing a site?
By mapping out your goals and objectives, even creating user personas, you’ll be designing a website that resonates with your audience and fulfils your business objectives.
The User Experience (UX)
When visitors land on your website, what do they do?
- Is it easy for them to find what they want?
- Can they navigate around the site easily?
- Are there multiple routes for them to be able to find and consume content or information?
- Can they download the documents they need, call your team, make an enquiry, or order your products?
If the answer is no to any of these questions, then you must adapt quickly to create the very best user experience in your website redesign.
Keeping your website visitors happy is the key to a successful business. Because if they don’t find what they need on your website, there’s a very high likelihood that they’ll go to one of your competitors.
So, if you’re getting a ton of traffic to your website but no leads, then the chances are that you’ll need to urgently look at your UX.
Closely aligned with user interface and user experience design is Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO. It’s not a “thing” that gets added to your website, as some mistakenly say, but rather a process of using a number of tools to surface insights that you can use to redesign your webpages better.
When you have the data to show you how people interact with your website, then you can make informed decisions about the necessary changes.
And that’s where we can help you with a digital marketing review or a website audit.
Once you know what’s wrong with your old website, you can take the steps to make it right.
Content Strategy
It’s vital that your website has a digital marketing strategy and a subset of that involves having a solid content strategy.
So often we see websites that either have no news, no blog, or no industry updates. Sometimes the content is incredibly out-of-date or there’s too much “fluff” that just doesn’t support the business’ core messaging.
Our experience and expertise in content strategy means that we can help redesign sections of your website so that you can provide ever more helpful content to your audience.
Sometimes, it takes a full-service digital agency, like Clever Marketing, to look at your existing website and totally reimagine your information architecture. Our team may suggest that you rebuild your website so that you can take advantage of a more relevant and helpful content strategy.
Digital Marketing, PPC, and SEO Strategy
That broader digital marketing strategy will take onboard your business goals and objectives – fulfilling user experience, providing relevant, helpful content that will enlighten and inspire your customers.
Our experts will advise on your content strategy but also how your website will function over the short term and longer term with regular SEO work to ensure that you not only start to rank better but also maintains your visibility and click through rates.
- Have you thought about how technical SEO will affect your design?
- Has local SEO been considered so that your site is effective in local search?
- Does regular SEO work figure in your ongoing business plan?
SEO is great, but supplementing your organic pages with PPC campaigns, we can help bolster your traffic in the short term and that may also require website redesign work. How your visitors interact with your main product pages might require that they are fully redesigned or that you keep them to match informational search intent and provide other page designs for users who are ready to buy and have a commercial intent.
Further to this we can design helpful informational content, signposting users once they’ve found the information they need and are convinced that your products and services are the right ones.
Form follows function, and that function is dictated by user experience and SEO requirements. So a redesign will take all this underlying, and at first seemingly intangible influence, making a much better design to provide an optimal experience for users.
Performance Max
Of course, Performance Max is a PPC term, but when it comes to redesigning a website, you really want to maximise the performance of the new design.
One of the “traps” we so often see with websites is that the visual aspect of a website is the key driver. A huge animated header with tons of graphic design and lots of features and functions might be what you think you want. But is it what you need?
When you prototype a web design, by making it look like the finished article but with dummy text etc, you start to see that pages load slower than you might have originally expected. Once that’s gone to build, you bake in all that “bloat” at the development stage and end up with a slow website.
Website performance has been a ranking factor for a decade now, and even viewing a website on mobile means you’ve only got a 3G connection, so the faster your website is, the better. Besides, users are still impatient and will go somewhere else if your business’ website doesn’t load quickly enough.
So do consider the functionality and the form of your website and whether it helps or hinders your audience. If your Document Object Model (DOM) makes the rendering of your current site slow (Check on PageSpeed Insights, Google Lighthouse, or GTmetrix) then you may need a redesign that makes your website or individual pages a little more lightweight.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to consider when redesigning a website but that’s why we’re here.
You might want a “quick refresh” or “just a rebrand” but, if the fundamentals of your current website design aren’t adequate, your website may continue to underperform.
This is where our long experience and expertise will help you realise what your organisation needs to succeed. A pretty website is nothing if it does not engage and convert.
So give us a call so that we can discuss your redesign project – it’s more than just “a lick of paint” and getting your redesign right may be the best thing you do this year and will sustain your business in the months and years ahead.
Call us on 01276 402 381 or complete the contact form now.