What’s your favourite food? Now, would you eat that every day for a couple of months consecutive? That would be a sure-bet way of ruining the taste of good food. The same principle applies everywhere, your relationship, favourite vacation spot, and even the thrill of visiting a website. Familiarity breeds contempt, and you need to spruce up things to keep the excitement levels consistently high. This article will be exploring the checklist for website redesign in 2022.
1. Audit Current Engagement and Performance
Coming out of the school of thought, if it’s working, don’t fix it, you need to establish precisely what you’ve got to understand what you need and want. Good web mastery intelligence dictates that empirical data from website analytics tools guide your actions. To establish:
a. Where are your visitors coming from
b. Which pages do they visit the most
c. Which pages get the most conversions
With the above information, it will be easy to sieve out weak pages (weak content), thereby establishing where you need to concentrate most of your redesign efforts. For the pages that are performing better, you can tweak them a bit to optimise the traffic.
2. Use Tools to Scale Up and Prototype Quickly and Efficiently
There are endless possibilities on approaching a website redesign, and a good number of developers fall into a loophole trap of spending too much on the design phase. Well, time comes at a premium, but that is not to say one should hurry up things and end up with a shoddy job.
On the contrary, there are website builders that can help you to bring ideas to life quickly. In a short time, you could have several options for the web pages you want to redesign. You could then pick the very best out of the bunch. And, don’t let your developer ego fix you up with slaving hours, days, weeks, perhaps months just to prove a point that you don’t need website builders to help. The design is your own; they just help you scale up faster.
3. Big on Optics Little on Engagement is a Fail
When you think about design, it is easy to limit yourself to just the optics entailing colours, fonts, among other elements. Well, that is a critical part of it, but only half of it. You cannot afford to neglect matching it to good user experience and engagement. On that front, looking at analytics will help you determine where your visitors spend the most time and enrichen those type of content while enhancing the platform.
Don’t waste a web page space with text, pictures, and videos bragging about your company. Instead, use that space demonstrating how your brand can help your visitors scale up. A great website tool for that is a blog site, where you can give detailed information on how your brand helps customers scale-up.
4. UX First, Second, to the nth
Above, we mentioned your site should not talk much about your brand. Instead, it should talk about how the brand can help the visitors. Remember, the site is there, not for you or your company, but the target customers. The website redesign workflow should be from the ground up, putting the user experience as the top priority.
A good web designer does not approach a website redesign assignment thinking about showing off their designing skills with imagery, animations, colours, and fonts. Rather, you first start by guaranteeing the functionalities and only add substance that will enrichen the user experience.
5. Come up with a Plan and Execute
Since we’re dealing with a website redesign project, a good designer will have established previous potential design mistakes and come up with solutions. These solutions will form the basis of their redesign plan. Naturally, some aspects of the site will remain unchanged, others tweaked a bit, and other parts get a complete overhaul.
6. Be SEO Rich
Hate it or love it, search engines – notably Google – wield insurmountable power over the internet. You must bow to their set standard practice, or you can be sure you will be left in the cold darkness. That is to say, in your website redesign work, make sure the site is search engine optimised (SEO).
That starts from having a modern design and responsive site that is mobile-friendly and has a good user experience. You also need to fit the site with content that is very relevant to your visitors. That is what SEO experts call having relevant keywords and longtail keywords relevant to your target audience. Nowadays, search engine crawlers also consider metrics such as page load time and the site’s security. So impress the crawlers.
7. Demo the Website Redesign
Before deploying the newly redesigned website, it is always good to demo it to small beta tester groups. These people will browse through the beta website and give you feedback. The feedback can help you avoid fatal mistakes, such as launching a new website redesign with different versions of problems or more problems than the previous design.
Also, the demo should include all the different devices users may use to access the site. That is, it should be beta tested on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices. That can be taken notches higher by including different browsers, and various internet connection speeds. You want the best possible experience for any given visitor across the spectrum.
Wrapping up…
Then again, the above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to matters website redesign project. There are many more to it not featured either because of time or deliberate move not to make this list too long to read. As a business owner, you probably have a lot on your plate, from managing your business’s inventory, sales, marketing, storage, and adherence to the local authority’s policies. The odds are high you are already stretched too to take up additional tasks of keeping tabs on the latest website developments.
You can reach out to us to let a professional handle the task for you. Thus, freeing up your hands for other pertinent issues of running your business. You can rest assured, our professionals have the skills and experience to bring trending standards to the website redesign project.
