5 Reasons For A Website Redesign

Your website is the public face of your organization or business.

You most likely have one already, but how well is it doing its job for you?

If your current website looks outdated, or just doesn’t work the way you would like it to, chances are your website is due for a redesign.

Today we’ll examine five glaring signs that your site needs an upgrade.

For most small businesses, non-profits, or individuals, the idea of starting a new website redesign project is daunting. Thinking about what you would like your site to do for you, and where the current version falls short is a good first step. Think of the following list as a starting point for determining the gap between where your website is and where you would like it to be.

#1. You need more incoming business. Who doesn’t? The days of the Yellow Pages have been replaced by Google Search. When customers look for your business name, you want to make sure it’s you that they find, and once they get to your site, it is easy to navigate and use. The longer people spend on your site, the more likely they are to do business with you later. Showing a professional looking website is just as important (often times more) as having a professional looking physical office.

Everything else I will say in this article stems from this one point: we could all use more business. Your website is there to generate more business for you, save you time, and improve perception of your brand. If your current site isn’t doing all of these things for you, that’s a huge reason to consider giving your site an overhaul, and hiring a company that understands SEO.

#2. Your website looks old. If your website hasn’t been redone since dial-up was cutting edge, it probably needs a facelift. Trust is a huge issue in business and e-commerce. A business site that looks and feels old can seem neglected to the public. Websites made a long time ago can be brought up to date visually, and made to feel more vibrant and alive, strengthening your brand. Fixing your old design to make it automatically fit on smartphones and tablets will make it easier for visitors to use it, and increase the chance that they will come back.

#3. People aren’t using your site as frequently as they used to. Worse yet, you might not even know why they are leaving.

It is a fairly simple thing to install a tool such as Google Analytics on your site. With analytic tools, you can see what pages users are entering and leaving on, and see the paths that they take on their visits. From this, we can deduce what pages need to be revamped in order for people to complete the tasks you want them to.

Imagine your site has an action you would like users to complete, such as putting something in a shopping cart and buying, or signing up for an email newsletter. If there is a specific stage where people get frustrated and abandon the entire process, we can see that pattern and change that specific step. We can also see if there is a specific page that people always leave the site from, more than other pages, and see what can be improved to retain time-on-site.

#4. No one in your organization has updated your site in a long time. Sites that are updated with news, articles, or events calendars look up-to-date. Visitors can see that someone is paying attention and taking care of the site. If no one is updating your website, we need to determine why. It usually comes down to two reasons: either no one is assigned to post new information to the site, or the process is too difficult. If there is someone who is assigned to updating the site, we can determine and fix the site to make it user-friendly for the site owners and managers.

There are many times when a site is coded in such a way that changing information is a challenge for the people taking care of it. This shouldn’t be the case as often as it is. Migrating your site to a system that is easy to manage and update is important, and can be the difference between frustration and happiness for a site owner.

#5. You have new features, functionality, or ideas that you want to introduce. If it’s been a while since your website was built or redesigned, there are probably new things that need to be added to it. Social media widgets or accounts that didn’t exist before, forums, shopping carts or e-commerce, and image galleries are just a few things that you might want to add to your site. Improvements to your website are improvements to your organization or business; they always have a positive return.

Starting a new website redesign project can be a little daunting before the work begins, but when it is finished, it should be something you feel good about. Removing obstacles for the site managers and the site users should always be a primary goal.

What to Look for in a Web Designer

Shopping for a new website can be a very confusing and intimidating experience.

Sometimes it is hard to judge if you are getting your money’s worth or not.

For small businesses or non-profit organizations, there isn’t a lot of room for error, so selecting a web designer should be a thoughtful decision process.

Hiring the right web professional for your project should be like hiring a good mechanic; they have a deep understanding of the technical process, but the best ones are honest about what your needs are.

In the coming weeks, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on how the design process works, some of the things your web developer should be thinking about when building your website, and what to look for in a web designer or SEO consultant.

While I’d like to really take my time to analyze each of these specific thoughts in more detail separately, for now I’d like to make a sort of outline of what’s to come. Putting my thoughts and my design process down helps everyone to see what web design really is at its core, which is problem solving.

A good designer asks a lot of questions at the beginning of a project. This isn’t because they’re inattentive, it’s because they are trying to discover what problem your website is trying to solve. There’s a perception that web design is a creative process, like art, and there is a portion of it that is, but the majority of it is closer to science. In order to fashion a good solution, the professional web designer gathers as much information as possible at the start. This saves vast amounts of time later on, and may even reveal things about the project that were unknown to the client and the designer beforehand.

Asking questions leads to even more questions in this initial stage. Who is the intended audience? What pain point are you solving for them? What is the intended outcome of the audience interacting with the website? What do you want them to do? How do you want them to feel afterwards?

After we have some of these questions answered, the next question becomes, how do you get these users to reach the goal you have set for them? What is the hierarchy of goals? Which goals are most important, and why?

Google Analytics can answer some of these questions. Such as, where are the users coming from? What is their technical level? Are they using it primarily on a phone or tablet? On a desktop? On a really old desktop?

Who is maintaining the website after it’s been launched? What is their technical level of knowledge? How much training do they need with the website? This one is a huge one that a lot of people, both clients and designers, tend to forget about. A site that is updated regularly has life, and a site that is never updated is like an old house that needs a new coat of paint and the lawn mowed. Activity shows life, and this also builds trust in your organization.

Once we have all that, we start thinking about strategies and techniques for achieving these goals. What types of content will we use? What types of images, colors, and fonts should the site use to elicit the desired mood and thoughts? What paths do we want the users to take through the site? And these are just some preliminary considerations. As we test and see how our target audience actually uses the site, we may change things to make them easier to use or find.

This is an awful lot to cover, but this gives you a good idea of the details that I’ll be writing about in the subsequent weeks and months.