Facing the challenge of a needing to redesign your website can be a daunting challenge. From the visualisation to combining your brand with your new requirements, and communicating the result to whoever is designing your site, there needs to be much planning, organisation, and cooperation involved in the process. And as any business owner should be aware, the greater the complexity a project has, the greater the potential for things to just plain go wrong. So it’s important to distinguish between what is nice to have and need to have requirements.
But as any savvy business owner also knows, effective preparation before undertaking a large project can go a long way toward preventing any ‘hiccups’ along the way, combined with an experienced web development projects can be smooth, rapid and refreshingly painless.
So how do you prepare for a website redesign? By asking the right questions!
1. What does your business website need to do?
Firstly try to define exactly what you hope your new site will achieve. Are you looking to convert visitors into customers and move product? Are you looking to acquire leads by wanting guests to leave their contact information, fill out an application, or subscribe to a newsletter?. This is your starting point for sites whether new or redesign.
Designing a site without a clearly defined objective is going to result in at least a certain degree of going around in circles without this clear sense of direction, the quickest way from A to B is in a straight line.
The potential variety of objectives your website can achieve can be staggering. Simple websites can turn fly-by browsers into lifetime customers dedicated to your brand, and expose entirely new audience segments to your product or service potentially increasing the diversity of your offering. The better planned out your new site is, the more effective it will be at achieving whatever goal best supports your company’s efforts, be that closing deals or opening new doors.
2. What’s wrong with your old site?
Building a new site can be very cost effective with our fixed price websites, but a redesign from scratch might be unnecessary for a business owner if their current site is already operating effectively, perhaps you need some bespoke enhancements or enjoy the benefits of monthly WordPress maintenance without the hassle of contracts.
So if you’re looking to build a new site, you need to ask yourself, why?
Is your current site outdated or ineffective at achieving your identified primary goal or simply in need of a fresh spring clean? Do visitors complain about your site’s appearance or functionality? Do mobile users struggle to navigate your site? Are you failing to reach the top of search results despite SEO efforts?, Have you done split testing and prefer to take your site in a particular direction.
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it’s time to start the ball rolling.
3. Nice to have versus need to have
If there is one thing modern web design is not lacking in, it’s bells and whistles. Websites with parallax scrolling, awesome full video backgrounds, custom remote fonts, interactive slider buttons… there are many tools and techniques open to the clever web designer to make your site really ‘pop’.
But do you really need all that? The more clever functionality and smart features you toss onto a website redesign, the higher the expense, and it’s important to strike a balance between spending money as a smart investment and spending money just to spend money.
Before you go looking to add any ‘web-Jitsu’ to your new site, focus on correcting the issues of the old site. A parallax stroller on an ineffective ‘call-to-action’ page does not make the ‘call-to-action’ any more effective!
4. Should I be using a content management system?
A content management system (CMS) is the flexible backbone of modern web applications. A CMS gives you, the owner of the website, the luxury of being able to easily update your site without requiring you to learn the art of web development from HTML and uploading new files to ensuring everything stays running smoothly. This will allow you to make changes on the website without having to rely on a developer for changes. And most CMS platforms, like the market leader WordPress, are so intuitive to control that if you can handle a word processor, you can handle a CMS.
5. Outsource or DIY?
Contracting an outside web design company like Real Code to handle your web design and development needs will not only free you up to focus on what you do best such as running your business it will also provide you with a much more polished and effective finished final product. There are plenty of web design hobbyist out there, but only a handful of vetted pros and the difference in the quality of work these two groups produce is striking.