When you have what you think is a successfully running business, a website redesign is probably not high up on your agenda. However, like the essence of any successful business, change is inevitable and is an important part of what keeps your website relevant.
Online visitors have a tendency to frequent websites that continually provide them with fresh and pleasant viewing experiences. They like nice things so they also like to visit nice websites – it's a human trait. If they can’t find those experiences at the sites they frequent regularly – then there’s a problem – and they're going to search out a new supplier website that 'connects' with them.
Over time therefore, a “stale” web design will cease to command the level of traffic that it did during its initial 8 to 10 months. The answer: Consider redesigning your website at least once a year – or more frequently if you are in a cyclically-oriented business or a business in the fashion area.
How Can Redesigning Help Your Business?
Just as your doctor advises you to come in for an annual health check – just to ensure all’s well with your body – so too do professional website builders recommend a periodic website review. In some cases, business owners end up learning things about their website that they are quite surprised to hear, like:
“Why is my old email still visible in some of the web pages on the site?”
“How come there are missing photos on some of the inner website pages?”
“Where did all these broken links come from – the website was fine a few months ago?”
However, a routinely scheduled website review can do much more for your business than simply highlight out of date content or graphics:
1) A Review: It can analyse your target market and see what’s missing on your website. Business opportunities may change, bringing shifts in target demographics and intended audiences. The site should be redesigned to leverage those opportunities and making sure you are “communicating” perfectly with your actual website audience and demographic.
2) Competitor Analysis: Reviewing the competitions' websites regularly will give you great insights into what they are doing differently from you. Retooling your own site accordingly could help reduce customer temptations of moving to the competition when they see that you have most of the content and offerings that you competitors have.
3) Enhance Content Appeal: A study by Adobe notes that “With only 15 minutes to consume content, 66% {of those polled} would prefer to view something beautifully designed vs. simple and plain”. A redesign review will highlight opportunities to enhance your content and make it more appealing. Human beings just like to associated with nice things, nice companies and nice websites. They feel like a nice website will belong to a nice company that will provide them with a better service or product range.
4) Relevance Check: Part of a redesigning review is what’s called a “relevance check”, where the reviewers assess whether your company image and your online brand are still relevant today; or whether they need to be redesigned and rebranded. With changes in customer taste, buying patterns and shifting brand loyalties, you may be missing out on potential revenue because your brand seems no longer relevant to your target audience. You need to fix that ASAP, and once fixed, that revised message needs to be told on your redesigned website
5) Expansion Opportunities: A website redesigning initiative is an ideal opportunity to take a closer look at how your company could add new product lines or service offerings which competitors may or may not be providing. Identifying such opportunities then requires your website to be altered so as to focus on those new offerings.
6) Missing Content: A recent survey of website usability indicated that “…more than half (54%) of respondents indicated that the lack of thorough contact information reduced a vendor’s a credibility and thus would cause them to leave a website”. When reviewing your site for possible redesign, your web designer will spot outdated product pages, irrelevant service information or missing contact or company details.
7) Differentiation: Changing business trends mean that what once used to be a Unique Selling Point (USP), might not be as unique in a year’s time. Your website should always represent a “killer” USP for visitors to get hooked onto. While redesigning the site, you may either change your existing USP, or create a totally new one to attract greater traffic to the site. You need to think of a good way to bring that USP to the attention of each website visitor – your website company can help you there.
8) Analytics: Good web designing is all about creating a site that attracts visitors. And to do that, you need to understand:
- • Who your existing visitors are
- • What geographic regions do they come from
- • What devices do they use to visit your website
- • Which pages do they spend most time on
- • What content do they view most frequently e.g. video, pdfs, user manuals
- • How long do they stay on your website
When conducting their review to look for redesigning opportunities, professional web technology companies will use advanced analytics tools to assess all of this information – and more! As a result, the redesigned site will leverage data that was harvested from the old site, and make it more attractive, “stickier” and more heavily trafficked!
Redesign Bottom Line
The one thing that’s constant in today’s dynamic business environment is change. And the one place that such change should be most visible in is a company’s website. Website visitors gravitate towards vibrant and continually refreshed and up to date sites.
“Build it once and they will come” is a phrase that was buried many years ago. To attract visitors, whom you can then turn into paying customers, your web design must remain in tune with your business environment and target market. If that’s not the case, your competitors will soon be stealing your clients away from you.
At the end of the day, a website that’s filled with stagnant content, stale design and irrelevant information will result in your business being overshadowed by your competition. Professional web designing companies, who are well versed in continuous improvement strategies, will be able to take that outdated site and turn it around with well focused and targeted redesign recommendations.
Doing It Right
So how should one go about redesigning your website?
A website redesign doesn’t necessarily mean changing every single page, or re-writing every single word of content on the site – not at all. However, what a redesign does entail is reviewing the constantly changing environment of your business, and then redesigning core elements of your website to mesh with those changes. That could be the layout of certain pages, product content on other pages, how the site works on smart phones or the logo and brand itself.
If you consult with a professional web designer about a possible redesign strategy, some advice that you are likely to receive is to ask yourself: “What’s changed with my business since the site was designed”? and “How can I be better online for my existing customers”? From there, savvy web professionals can lead you through a structured process for retooling and redesigning your site so it meets all of your changing business objectives.
If you'd like to discuss your website ideas with a professional web team feel free to call us on 01-6216866 for a free phone consultation and later we can schedule a face to face meeting. We have all the experience and imagination required to take your website to wherever it needs to be.
