12 Mar Does Your Website Need to Be Redesigned?

The core of your online presence is your website. However, in order for your business to perform well online, you’ll need to do more than simply have a website. You’ll also need your website to be modern, engaging, functional and easily accessible. A sloppy web design can majorly impact your conversions, sales and brand authority in a negative way. If your website looks outdated or doesn’t perform the way you would like it to, you may want to consider a website redesign to help you bring your metrics back up and stay ahead of your competition.

Let’s look further into why you should consider a website redesign, where to get started with one, and why you need to make your website mobile-friendly.

Why Should You Consider a Redesign?

You may think your website is fine as it is, or you might already know what potential issues your current website is facing. But, how do you really know if your website needs a redesign?

Here are three major telling points that may indicate the need for a website redesign:

• Your website looks old — An old, outdated website indicates to your customers that your business isn’t invested in innovation. After all, if your website looks like it hasn’t been given attention in years (or decades), who’s to say the same isn’t also possibly true for your products or services?
  
• You’re seeing a drop in conversions and sales — There are many reasons your business could be experiencing a decrease in sales and conversions from your website, but one potential cause is the website design itself. This is a natural side-effect of users abandoning your website because it looks old, or it could indicate there are functional issues getting in the way of the site’s usability due to a lack of updates over time.
  
• Users have given negative feedback about using your website and issues with its appearance — This is the most straightforward sign that you need to redesign your website. If a single person has a complaint, you can be sure there are many others who have experienced the same issue but decided it wasn’t worth the effort to voice their concerns. Likely, those who don’t point out the issues leave your website before investing even another thought into your business.

If your website is facing any one of these issues or a combination of them, you’ll need to consider redesigning your website ASAP in order to keep your sales and conversion rates high.

Where to Get Started with a Redesign

So, you’ve decided that you need to redesign your website. Great! But, just where do you get started? It can seem overwhelming, and diving in without a thorough plan can end up being a waste of time and resources.

Consider the following tips on how to redesign your existing website.

Before getting straight to work, you’ll need to meet with your business leaders and/or your marketing team to outline your goals and expectations for redesigning your website. Your goals should include what you want your website to help you achieve for your business, while your expectations should focus on how you want your website to help you get there. Expectations should include your buyer personas (how you think your users will interact with your website), website functionality features, a project timeline and your budget. Once those steps are accomplished, the redesign work can begin!

There are four major stages to redesigning your website:

Content Stage

First, you will want to create or organize your current sitemap of all the pages and URLs on your website. Then, tools like Google Analytics can be used to audit the current state of your website’s performance. Next, a new sitemap is created based on the audit report. The process includes adding new pages, removing the redundant ones, and restructuring the pages that will best suit your website. After this, you can start thinking about content. You can pull out all the existing content from the website and saving it elsewhere, such as in Microsoft Word or in Google Docs. Finally, you’ll want to collect your current and new images. You may either use free stock photo websites, paid stock photos, or images from your own business.

Design Stage

Once you have a better understanding of the current content on your website as well as the direction you would like to take your content moving forward, you can then start focusing more on the actual website design. However, it’s important to remember that design and content go hand-in-hand. Make things easier by focusing first on the homepage to settle on your primary design and content elements. Then, your design team can work on mockups to get an idea for the rest of the website. You’ll want to carefully select your fonts, images, colors and page templates to create a cohesive design and brand voice.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to the success of your website. While creating an effective SEO strategy is a complex and ongoing process, learning the basics of SEO can greatly improve your site’s reach and performance. In order to know what to improve, you’ll need to know the current state of your SEO with an SEO audit from a reputable source. Once you’ve learned which pages are the most popular for your website, you can spend more of your focus on them. However, it’s important not to change these well-performing pages too much, or else risk them becoming less effective. Remember to also keep your page URL structures simple and consistent. 

Development Stage

This is the stage when everything comes together as a fully developed website. Your web developer and/or web designer will create a demo version of the site for you to access and view as updates are implemented. Then, the front-end aspects of the website will be transferred to a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, to make future changes and updates easier. Then, your website will be adapted to have a responsive design for mobile devices. Final steps will include testing and familiarizing yourself with how to update your website if your design agency will not be managing it for you.

Why Should My Site Be Mobile Friendly?

Mobile responsiveness in web design is now more important than ever before, with users more frequently accessing websites via their phones and other mobile devices as opposed to laptops and desktop computers. If your website has poor usability on mobile devices, users and potential customers won’t stay on your website long enough to engage with it or make any purchases. This is why you need to make sure your website redesign is mobile friendly. Mobile is crucial to the success of your business. Whether your website is strictly e-commerce or for a brick-and-mortar business, it is vital to offer the best user experience, which includes mobile responsiveness and accessibility.

Redesign Your Website with the Experts

If you’ve officially decided to redesign your website, don’t waste time and resources with an inexperienced web designer. Instead, choose a web design and marketing team that has the skill and experience to meet your needs! Virtual Stacks Systems UK offers expert web design and website redesign services as part of our full-service digital marketing solutions. Contact us today to discuss your web design ideas!