What to Consider Before Re-Designing Your Website

You need to have concrete reasons pushing you towards re-designing your website otherwise your efforts doing so will not be 100% effective. As no one to let money nor time go do to waste, you should consider the following before you redesign your website.

7 Check-boxes to Mark Before a Website Redesign

1. What is the Purpose of the Redesign?

As you plan to redesign your website, ensure it is for the right purpose and your reasons make sense, economic sense. Embarking on a redesign just to change the color from blue to red, or worse, because you are bored will be a futile effort. There are certainly better ways to kill boredom without having to risk the huge lead magnet, and sales funnel that is your website.
Thus, when you design your website, make sure it is for the right reasons. As you seek out the purpose, determine what you want from the redesign.

• Is it more visitors?
• More Leads?
•  Reduced bounce rates?

2. How User Friendly is Your Website?
Customers must be drawn to your site for it to be the lead magnet you wish it to be. One of the ways to increase your site’s appeal is to make it more user-friendly. This is only achieved when the website design fulfills the needs of visitors surfing through your site. One such requirement – and it is a big one amongst consumers – is the need for websites that are mobile friendly.
Accordingly, for your site to highly user-friendly and attract more traffic streams to your site, you will need to hire a web developer that is skilled at designing web 2.0 built websites. Luckily for you, that is exactly what I do. Contact me and, together, we will begin the path towards a more user-friendly website.

3. What’s Your Website Re-design Time plan?

You need to consider the time a redesign project will take as it will comprise downtime for your site. The shortest time possible would preferable for it will help you keep the loss of traffic to a minimum. Therefore, be advised to discuss your options regarding time frames and the factors that will affect the same extensively with you developer. This factors will include the scope of the redesign and your developer’s schedule among others.

4. Have you Checked your Competitors’ Website?

In the business world, the rule is; always strive to be ahead of the competition. Accordingly, before you redesign your own, make sure to analyze competitor websites.
“What are they doing?” Is the question to answer, as well as, “how much better can you do the same functions on your website after you redesign it?” After responding to these questions, you can proceed and add extra features or better still add new features that none of your competition uses to your website to get ahead of them.

5. Have you Integrated a good CMS?
A good Content Management System is central to a website’s functionality. It should thus be considered as you plan to redesign your site. When programmed correctly, a good content management system will help fix your site’s navigation, information architecture, and content. It will, also, allow for seamless organization of content and in effect make your next redesign a breeze by separating the website design and content allowing you to focus on the template only while on the next project.

6. What is the scope of changes to be made?
If your site has a high number of repeat visitors, you might need to reconsider extensive changes and the effects these effects shall have on your users. Other than the risk of these changes being off-putting, there is the risk that your search engine rankings will be negatively affected.
For this reason, it is essential that your site tries to keep its essential elements including the main header and navigation features. Additionally, rather than destroy all the backlinks you have accumulated over the years, ensure that the developer you choose is competent enough to preserve them.

7.  Have you considered Website SEO?
As you redesign a website, consider the power of search engines and their ability to increase your online ratings. If the design you are currently using then the revamped one you get after redesigning, simply must be search engine friendly.
To this end, some of the areas you need to work on, on the website to make it more SEO friendly are:

• The current title pages: Should they be kept or would re-wording make them more effective
• Headers: Determine where can be used. . . and
• Internal links: Determine how and where they can be used within the website to make it more effective.
•  Google SEO tools: Find out what tools you can integrate into your website to help you better optimize your site for search engines.

Wrap Up
The role a good website plays towards a firm’s overall marketing efforts should not be under-estimated. Because of this also, redesigning your website should be done with the utmost professionalism. Despite what seems to be too many aspects to consider, I assure you, you need not panic. I make website redesigning a smooth endeavor to all my partners. Get in touch, and we will explore all the options you might need and where my help will come in.