Website Redesign - Will This Story Ever End?

It's that time again. Your website needs a redesign. You found some sites you think are cool and want to model. You start reaching out to designers because you're last one disappeared somewhere. Wait. Stop right there. You're going the wrong way. Aesthetics are important and all but you're not selling your looks are you? And who's got the money to compete purely on looks anyway? Your company has brains too. Plan a bit first. Consider these basic questions before you contact the web designer.

Website redesign looks a bit different these days. While the web becomes more visual, the process of website redesign has gone the other way: how will it work? what does it do? Getting clear on the goals for your company's website is the first step. After all, this could get costly and time-consuming. So might as well start off right.

Do you have the content and calls-to-action in place to support the intended behaviors?

Notice I said find and share. It's not enough anymore to try to load up on keywords and backlinks to ascend in the ranks of Google search resultsville. Get hip to the blogging and social scene where your prospects hang out. And then get busy. Make it easy to share what you're putting out there. This happens both on- and off-site. Be socially accessible and acceptible. Be mindful of where people will find you and not just getting found.

This is the tough one. Getting real about your online goals is not easy, but critical when pondering what direction your website and ultimately your company's web identity will take. I can't help but think about the good old days when throwing money at a yellow pages ad was pretty darn appealing for a small business. Ah, it was a simpler time then. Fast forward to the present. The blog and social cyberworld can be a daunting place. Especially since it's always easier to measure revenue than it is to measure activity.

Think of technical improvements that can be made - if you are going to go through with a website redesign you should take the time to do it properly. Consider all of the technical areas that can be improved with the redesign? Can your pages be redesigned so that they load faster and have cleaner coding practices overall?

A site redesign gives you the chance to serve up top quality content that is potentially fresh and increasingly beneficial to your audience and the search engines. Ensure that you content is well optimized, but not over optimized. Ensure that you are focusing on content themes and interlinking relevant pieces of content. Most importantly ensure that your content is highly engaging and useful for the user. You should be able to make vast improvements with a well-planned and well executed website redesign.

First, you need to know the profile of the people who visit your site. If your intended target market isn't currently on the site, you'll need to revisit your online marketing efforts. Knowing who is on the website will help reveal the mindsets of those visitors, and how your design can support their goals. Tailoring your website to their objectives might result in different paths from the home page, each serving content differentiated for user needs.

Many companies ake the mistake of optimizing their websites for the content they have, rather than matching their web content to customers needs. When setting your web strategy, find out what information online visitors are seeking—and then shape the content strategy around what users need.

Your site may offer the information users need but–if it's poorly organized–they will never find it. Common causes: poor navigation, unclear link names, site errors, and technical issues. Consumers don't like to have to play around to uncover the information they need. Eliminating basic usability issues can increase online acquisition and retention efforts dramatically.

Ultimately, web design needs to work in conjunction with a solid content strategy, SEO, and conversion optimization to be fully successful.

Kaizen is an Eastern business philosophy. It's all about daily changes; little changes that circumvent a huge overhaul. And it’s not change for the sake of change. That’s no fun unless you are a web design firm and someone is paying you handsomely for your time. It’s change to eliminate waste and improve functions; like removing five pages on your website that say the same thing and merging those pages into one to enhance your UX. Your website redesign should not be a massive three-month long exercise that takes place every year. Instead, once you have designed your site, you should follow this formula in an ongoing cycle until the end of time, or until the world ends this year:

Measure the key metrics
Tweak your design slightly to improve your metrics
Revisit your metrics and compare
Keep those changes that resulted in a positive improvement while reverting on other changes
Rinse and repeat

Making only one change at a time makes it easy for you to measure the exact impact of that change while all other factors remain constant. Employing the Kaizen method during the redesign would have been better as any changes could have been closely monitored and repaired.

Kaizen also stresses the need to do a root cause analysis of problems.