Website Redesign
Key Takeaways
- Before starting your redesign, you'll need to establish your website's current weaknesses. This can be done using analytics and testing.
- When conducting a site redesign, you should keep your goals and target audience in mind at every step. Your goals should be specific and measurable.
- High-quality content is essential to the redesign process, so every content element should be considered (i.e., page copy, images, videos, CTAs, and forms).
Before we can start working on your new web design, there are several important things you need to know. This is to ensure that your branding is targeted and will help you towards achieving your business goals.
Your Target Audience
If you don’t know who your audience is, you won’t be able to reach them. purpleplanet’s job isn’t just to make your website look pretty. A website redesign needs to be done with specific goals in mind. The more you can tell us about your clients, the better we can build the site for those potential customers. Every part of your website redesign should have your target audience in mind. Remember, we aren’t designing the site for you – we’re designing it for the people who are going to buy your products or services and, ultimately, paying your bills.
Important information for quality website redesign
Some important information to know about your customer base could be:
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Online behaviour
- Browser preferences
- Preferred viewing devices
Most of this information is available in your Google Analytics dashboard. If you don’t have that setup yet, it’s a must. We can help you with that too, but we’ll focus on that in another blog post.
Your Current Weaknesses
Why do you feel you have to update your site? We are constantly advising clients on necessary updates and tweaks to their websites, with some of the most common reasons being:
- The website looks outdated and worn
- Functionality on site elements isn’t 100% reliable
- A competitor just launched a new or updated website
These may be good grounds for a redesign but, without first understanding where your current site is failing, the whole exercise could be pointless.
To establish your current website’s weaknesses, use a combination of analytics and testing. Check to see where people are leaving your website without converting. Check with your customer service department for any issues customers may have had with your current website. A great looking website is only part of the solution – if your customers aren’t converting, then the rest of that solution also needs work.
Your Best Content
When the time comes to redesign a website, many users want to start from scratch. Others want to amend very little, with just the odd tweak or cosmetic change. Neither is the optimal approach. There’s every chance that you already have some great content – by the same token, there may be too much content that isn’t of interest, is out of date or no longer relevant to your business. A redesign is a good time to separate the wheat from the chaff – to work out what is working and what isn’t. Also remember that good content is likely to be helping your search rankings, so you’ll want to keep pushing that.
All elements of your content should be considered:
- Page copy
- Images
- Videos
- Calls to action
- Forms
The is an opportunity to improve on what you have, not to start the entire process from zero.
Your Business Goals
If your aims are simply “sell more“ or “get more leads“, then you need to reassess your marketing strategies. Be more specific with your goals, such as “increase turnover by 30% over last year” or “gain ten new clients by year-end”.
If you don’t set goals, you have no yardstick by which to measure progress once your new website is active. The goals you set will also be key in the design phase, allowing your designer to add focus, where necessary, to key elements of your site.
Your Marketing Plan
A website, new or old, will not bring success to your business on its own. You will need to market the site, perhaps with custom landing pages for downloads, resources, webinars, etc. in order to point your potential customers to the value areas. The site should also be flexible enough to allow for quick and easy amendments or updates, for example adding a new call to action, a new video box or a special promotion button. Your website is never “finished” – it needs ongoing care and attention, to ensure that your target audiences are being reached, with the most appropriate content. The best websites usually get rebuilt after just a couple of years, but the time between is used to bend and shape what is on offer, in order to maintain the maximum customer focus.
Website redesign is not just creative – it’s also scientific. It’s not just about looking good – it’s about offering the right content. A website rebuild is a fresh focus for your company that, with careful management, can move your business to the next level.