The Seven Steps for a Successful Redesign Process!

No doubt that the revolution of new technologies and new design concepts are the new trend. Clever marketers are keen to represent their corporate image with the most modern looks and up-to-date technologies.

When considering a redesign project, there must be a good reason behind it. We often hear “it’s been a while since we’ve done it” or “I want our business to look bigger”… These are not good enough reasons. It’s not just about how your site looks, it’s about how it works!

Every redesign project starts with a need. This need appears from a vision and insight to how you want your business to look like. Once you identify this, your process shall run smoothly. But wait, that’s not all, you need to consider different factors along the process.

Here’s what is needed to build a well-structured redesign process.

Build Your Strategy

Building a strategy is the backbone of your project. You need to allocate the needed time and dedicate full resources to accomplish your goal. Start your strategy on a piece of paper, write down your
goals and what you want to achieve from your website (You aiming for a full revamp, an uplift, or a complete trimming of your website?). Finally, make sure you allocate the full resources for your project before you begin. Keep a record of your strategy to be revisited in all upcoming and following stages.

Document your website’s statistics & build your goals

Remember, you are not developing/designing a new website; this post’s objective is to redesign your current website. That is why you have to document your current website performance and build your goals upon it. The matrices you got to consider are:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visitors
• Number of total visitors
• Time spent on site
• Bounce rate
• Current SEO ranking in terms of important keywords
• Domain authority
• Number of new leads generated

All these matrices could be found easily through visiting your Google Analytics or any similar measurement tool.

By being exposed to the above analytics can help figure out your current status and compare it to the desired objective. You can set up your goal objectives by specifying the target matrices you would like to reach within a specific period of time.

Run a Competitors Analysis

Well, don’t get me wrong here; the purpose is not to copy your competitors design and content distribution to your own. It is always good to see what other competitors are doing and how can you improve your website. Competition Analysis helps you know how to compete with others and what are the areas you need to work on to present a better and an updated website display. Check how your competitors are ranking on search engines, how they are displaying their content, what fields are mainly highlighted, and other things that might interest you. Write them down and compare your redesign strategy with the ones available right now to modify and improve. It’s easy when you have it all documented.

Unify Your Brand

Unifying your brand does not mean that you need to rebrand your line of products or services; this means that you have unify your branding messages all through the entire website. Keep it consistent in a way that your visitor will understand what it is about and what your main selling points are. For example don’t show your brand/product as it is number one product sold. Instead, let your visitor feel the importance of your product/service through highlighting the benefits that he/she will get.

A good way to demonstrate your brand in words is using the FAB module; Features, Benefits, & Advantages.

Here’s how:

You should promote at least one main Feature of your product that really catches the interest of your visitors. List it down. Then list the Advantages of this feature. Finally, list the Benefits they will get from the Features and the Advantages you mentioned. The Benefits section should be really tempting and personal to convince your user about the importance of your product. This formula should be done on different products and in different sections of your website. But remember, you have to apply the FAB only when you believe that your product enjoys what you are marketing.

Segment Your Website to Your Targeted Buyers

Even if you are selling one product on your website or demonstrating a unified service, you should have targeted buyers and your website must reflect that. Know who are your targeted buyers and understand fully your buyer persona to create content and marketing messages convenient to all. This is easy to do. You only have to understand your target segmentation and split your content to target each. You might end up creating a new product target that you’ve never been aware of previously. This really works well with hosting plans where you find segmented product ranges each targeting a certain targeted audience. This also works in other industries. For example if you are running a restaurant in Beirut that offers breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You might want to segment your website to target each category on its own. Also you can split your targeting to sub categories like demonstrating the drive-through service and eat-in as well as the delivery service. Trust me; up having a bunch of new comers to your restaurant before you know it.

Optimise Your Website

If you hire an SEO Specialist, that will optimise your ranking on search engines, that’s great, however if you can’t afford it or simply don’t want to invest in that, then at least do the basics when redesigning your website and make it search friendly. After all, what is the use of a website if you are not receiving traffic or not converting? Nothing! In a previous post, I mentioned what are the basics of having an SEO friendly site, however you can still do the simple work to make your website “friendly”. Here’s how are some of them:

First, you should make your entire pages link “search engine friendly”. Meaning that you don’t want to add “?” or “Id=123” in your page links. Let each link represent the page you are showing in keywords.

Second, keep an eye on your highly ranked pages, the ones that are getting the highest traffic, and try to cross market other content on your website to these pages.

Third, have a clean coding system with proper sitemaps and robots.txt file so that search engines can easily navigate your content.

Forth, use keywords that are relevant to your content over search engines. This could be done easily through different keyword research tools; Try Google Keyword Planner, I find it one of the best.

Fifth, create a 301-redirect strategy in case you are getting rid of old urls and want to update them with new ones. This strategy will help search engines allocate the new content and redirect users to it without affecting your current ranking on search engines.

Check our SEO page to know what exactly needs to be done for proper ranking.

Make your website compatible

I personally do not use Internet Explorer, but when I am working on a project, the first thing I work on is IE browser and make sure it is compatible, because if you don’t use that does not mean it’s obsolete. Same goes for the mobile; In case you don’t have a mobile application; keep in mind that your website is compatible with mobile devices and pads, and reaching the highest potential of visitors regardless of their browsing habits.

Keep Your Treasures Running

Finally, your website might have treasures that you don’t want to lose. These treasures could be highly shared content, pages with high number of inbound links, high visited pages, best performing/ranking keywords and associated pages, etc… You should keep these running in your new design otherwise you will risk losing a lot of traffic and make it difficult to get found. Take into consideration that your web designer is not a marketing person or SEO specialist. That’s why you should highlight these treasures when starting your redesign process.

If you’re interested to get more details about your redesign project or would like us to help you with it, contact us and we’d be happy to help.