What web design steps businesses should be considering TODAY
With just a short time left before we turn the calendars, it’s that time of year when website designing takes centre stage. Now’s the time when business owners and website operators should be looking at their websites, in order to understand what web site design updates or changes might be needed to position the business for the New Year.
Why Now?
There’s plenty of time before the New Year hits us, I hear you say! So, why would you start reviewing your website now? Well, the closer that you get to crunch time, the more difficult it becomes for you and your website designing agency to plan and execute a well-thought-out strategy of website updates.
But there’s even more reason for you to get started on a website refresh project now:
- Most online businesses start earlier, rather than wait for the last few weeks of the year. That’s because year-ends are usually busy times of the year for everyone, so you want to give your web designer as much of your time a possible – before you and your team get swamped with year-end tasks.
- It’s very likely that your competitors are already finalising their web designing and refresh ideas. Do you really want to be the last one amongst your peers to come up with a fresh-looking website?
- Like you, professional web designing services are trying to plan their workloads for the new year. As they try to fill their order books, they usually offer preferred pricing to clients that book early. Now’s a great time to contact your web designer to ensure they allocate the right resources so you can launch a fresh site by the start of the new year.
Working with your team of web professionals well before the year ends, also gives you enough time to test-drive the new/refreshed site, and iron out any kinks prior to the new year. Your web designer also needs time to take all of your thoughts and suggestions, and come up with a sound technical design for the proposed site refresh.
Starting earlier also provides you another important operational benefit. Once some of the more significant updates are complete, you could even get your web design service to run parts of the newly designed site in parallel with the existing one, so you can collect live stats about visitor “likes” and traffic patterns. Use that feedback to further enhance your web designing ideas for the refresh, so they can be included in the site to be launched in the new year.
The time to re-evaluate your website, and get yourself ready for the new year, is NOW.
New Year Website Design Considerations
As you plan your website refresh for the new year, what considerations should you have at the top of your mind? Well, here are a few ideas that you should discuss with your web design agency before you sign up for a refresh:
- Out with the stale – in with the fresh: Go through every page on the site, and carefully check content and relevance of each one of them. Remove tired looking pages and information/products that are not relevant, and have your website designer replace them with more current/applicable content.
- Catalogue and price check: It’s possible that, over this year, you may have changed product offerings, added new “bundled” products, and plan on revamping your pricing in the new year. Make sure your site has all these new services and products that you offer to clients. Most importantly, as part of your web design refresh, ensure that your product catalogue and pricing is uniform across the site.
- Graphics and backgrounds matter: You could change content all you like, but if visitors are greeted with the same old pictures, background themes and images, then your site will still look “old and tired!”. Ask your web designing agency to come up with a fresh set of colours and themes for the refreshed site.
- What’s the competition up to? You can get some great web design insight by taking a look at what the competition is doing. Don’t get swayed by all of the bells and whistles your peers are deploying – they cost more and are often a drag on download and page refresh time! Instead, work with your web designer to refresh your site to make it look more inviting than your competitors’.
The above are four website refresh considerations to get started. Once you start discussing ideas with your web designer, it’s easy to get carried away and do a lot more to the website than you initially anticipated. RESIST! Unless your website is over 3 to 4 years old, you likely don’t need to tear it down and start from scratch.
Work with a seasoned web design agency and plan the project before you start implementing it. If required, you could start with the 4-point plan discussed above, and then see how things work out during the first few months of the new year. If you are satisfied with the results, perhaps you could get your web designing team make additional refreshes as phase two of the project in the new year.
