7 Things To Consider When Re-Designing Your Website
Your website not merely establishes your online presence, but also functions as a powerful marketing tool – it’s like a business card or a brochure that displays the products and services you have to offer. It is also an advertisement, a listing and a sales pitch – and all these functions are crucial to ensure brand recognitions and business success.
This means the design of your website, and its content, are extremely important – you have to create a good first impression. Take a good look at your website, and consider whether it has all this functionality. If not, you need to redesign your website.
Redesigning a website can make it more appealing to visitors, and user friendly as well. But before you start, here are some things to think about:
Identify what needs to change
Check out what aspects of your design are working, and what needs to change. Analytics can help you see what your visitors like and value and what they don’t. Remove or alter what is not working. Your website has a direct impact on your online marketing performance – and analytics can play a huge role in helping you see things like which CTAs are not being clicked by visitors, which pages are not being visited, and so on. A website design agency can help you with this task.
Define your Goals
Redesigning your website is a project, so set goals, like its aesthetics, SEO friendliness, marketing functionality, and so on. Rather than loads of visual features and complex code that may create problems, stick to simple code and seamless functionality – this will ensure quicker loading and ease of use.
- Set specific numbers, like: 50,000 visitors, or 25% increase in number of leads
- Design goals should be specific, like: clean lines with ample white space
- Think of specific functions, like: more prominent CTAs, easy forms that can be filled quickly
Know Your Target Audience
It’s imperative you know your audience well, so do your homework – what do they like, what keywords do they use to search, which social network do they prefer, their age group, professions, geo-location, and so on. Create a buyer persona. This will significantly help you in your website redesigning project.
What’s Your Competition Doing?
It’s always a good idea to see what your rivals are doing, and what works for them – you can take pointers, and learn from their mistakes too. Look at their sites from the point of view of a customer, and compare your site with the other. That will give you fresh perspective and help you set goals for the revamping.
Overhaul your Content Strategy
A successful website needs a great design and good content too; redesigning is the right time to rethink your content strategy. Remove old blogs that have lost relevance, or update or improve them, and re-post to get new leads. See what content is doing well, and save it as a template for the future.
How SEO friendly is the site?
One of the main purposes of redesigning your website is to give a shot in the arm to your online marketing efforts, so make sure that your site gets discovered by people. This is where SEO comes in. Some of the ways to optimize your site are:
- Ensure proper page titles, meta descriptions, and permalinks for all content
- Content should be designed so as to ensure readability – include headings and sub-hadings to break the content into readable pieces
- Use the appropriate keywords on landing pages
- Minimize loading time of every page
- Make sure it’s responsive – offering a smooth UX to the visitor regardless of the browser they use to view it on
Which platform is ideal?
Decide on the CMS you will use, because the functionality your site will have depends on the CMS. Make sure that the CMS has a good mix of choices as well as functionality required to achieve your business goals. Determine what benefits and features the CMS needs to have in order to be able to deliver optimal experience to your customers, and which you can do without. WordPress is one of the best CMSes that offer dozens of themes and templates and customization options.
When was the last time you updated or redesigned your website? Take an unbiased look – does it need a makeover? If yes, you’re in the right place. IPIX Tech Services is a web design and development company with over 15 years of experience in helping customers to establish a robust online presence, drive more traffic, increase conversions and boost revenues. Contact us to know how we can transform your website.