If it is clear that your business needs a website redesign after reviewing the factors above, you may still have some hesitation.
We often compare redesigning a website to moving to a new home. It’s a dramatic shift and it’s normal to be nervous about things going smoothly. Below are the most important steps for a website redesign project.
1. Audit Your Existing Website
Before you can establish the goals for your new website, you need to understand your current web situation.
First, if you have Google analytics or analytic tracking installed on the website, review the data for the last 3 months for your site. If your business has certain slow seasons, you may want to also review the data for the past year and the past 6 months.
Pay attention to the following metrics:
- Total traffic to the site each month
- Bounce rate for the home page and for main pages
- Top visited pages
- Conversions – contact form submissions, live chat and/or phone calls
Next, evaluate the security and speed of your site. There are several free speed tests that you can run and it’s typically best to run several of them and get an average for the site page load time.
Also, look for any security issues on the site. You should have an SSL certificate installed and HTTPs protocol activated for the site. Go through the major pages of your site and look for any bugs or problems. You’d be surprised how many site owners forget to audit their site on a regular basis.
Finally, conduct some competitive research and review your competitor’s websites. You may also want to review the websites of industry leaders in your market. You don’t need to delve too deeply into inspirational and competitive research at this stage as most web agencies and designers will help you with this research during the web project.
2. Establish Your Goals & Find The Best Web Team
After completing your audit of the existing site, put together your top goals for the new website. These may include improving the user experience and conversions, boosting the overall speed & performance, and/or adding new functionality and integrations.
Your top priorities and goals for the website project will guide your search for the right web team. For instance, if you are a B2B business, you’ll want to find a web agency experienced in effective B2B website design. Or, if you are looking to add an online store to your WordPress site, you’ll want an agency experienced in WooCommerce e-commerce development.
When selecting a partner for the website project, remember that it takes 3 very unique skills to great a high-quality website: web strategy, web design and web development. It’s very rare to find a single freelancer who is the best in all these different skills. Depending on your budget for the project, you’ll typically find that a small to mid-size web agency will have at least 3 experts involved in the web project – a user experience web strategist, a website design development team. You’ll also want to make sure that the development team is experienced in the web platform that you’ll be building the site on.
3. Focus on a Visitor-Centric Approach
If you aren’t familiar with the term, a visitor-centric approach means that you focus on your website visitors and designing the site to meet their needs.
A lot of businesses will make the mistake of deciding what they want on the website and what their executives want on the site. That’s nice, but the website isn’t for your team – it’s for your web visitors. If you want to increase conversions and engagement, then you need to understand the different types of visitors coming to the site and make the site relevant to them.
Working with a web strategist at the start of the web project can help you focus on the web visitors. A web strategist can then create a wireframe of the home page and make sure that page guides users to the right information and ultimately convert.
4. Content Mapping
Before starting the design process, you’ll also want to determine the site structure for the new website. A web strategist can help you create the information architecture, which refers to prioritizing and labeling the navigation and main pages of the site. Any research into your visitor classes and your website visitors’ concerns can guide you on the most important pages and content for the site.
You also want to look at the most visited pages of your current site and make sure to keep and improve that content. The information architecture will be a visual outline of the website navigation and any drop down and internal pages.
When mapping out the content for the new site, try to reduce the number of pages as much as possible. A lot of older websites used to have tons of pages in drop down menus. However, a larger majority of web visitors are viewing websites on mobile and tablet devices.
Long drop down menus are very difficult to navigate on small devices. You also don’t want to overwhelm visitors with too many options. Modern sites will move a lot of the content on the site into blog posts or resource sections. This is a great way to keep the content for SEO and educational reasons.
5. Design Phase
After completing a content plan and a wireframe or wireframes for the new site, you’ll begin the design phase. When you work with WRDS, we provide a demo designed site for your approval. A custom web design has several advantages because it allows us to integrate your branding into a high-quality, modern design.
We are also well-versed in UX design and mobile-wise design. UX design refers to the use of visual elements, graphics and hierarchy in order to create an engaging experience on the site. All websites are built on mobile-responsive platforms, meaning that the site content will adjust for the viewing device. However, your web design should be considering how all the design elements and content will adjust for the mobile view. This practice is called mobile-wise design.
During the design phase, you’ll typically review a custom mockup for the home page, one or two critical internal pages and a universal page template, depending on the budget for the project. You’ll typically go through one or two revisions for the designs.
6. Development Phase
After approving the design mockups in the design phase, your web team will start the coding or development phase. If you are building the site on a content management system like WordPress, the development team should use a mobile-responsive WordPress framework and follow best practices in terms of security & performance during the build.
During this phase, the developers will also build out any complex functionality for the site, such as e-commerce, membership or third party integrations.
The development phase of the project will also focus on content migration and styling for the internal pages of the site. If your existing site has a blog and numerous blog posts, the web team may migrate all of the posts over if possible or manually move each one.
Unless the web team has a content writer or you’ve hired a content writer for the website, you’ll be responsible for supplying all of the written text for certain pages of the site. Content can be the biggest hold up on website projects, so you’ll want to make sure you have all this content ready prior to starting the development phase.
7. Launching The New Site
Once all of the pages of the new website are built, you’ll begin the final stage of quality control and prepare to launch.
This last step of a website project can feel like the last two minutes of a professional basketball game – it can feel very intense and drag on. There can be a lot of anxiety about launching a new site and some clients may want to keep tweaking the site until every item is perfect. However, if you’ve built the site on a platform that is easy to manage, the launch of the site isn’t the end. You can and should continue to improve the site.
In order to launch the site, you’ll need to gather the following info for the website team or your IT department, depending on who is launching the site:
- Logins to your existing site
- Logins for your domain registrar and hosting
- Information about your email setup in case this could affect any hosting changes
As a final quality control, you’ll want to make sure any analytics tracking codes are installed on the new site and all of the forms are configured to the proper email notifications. Your web agency will guide you on all of these items.
If you are planning to launch the site for a specific marketing campaign, always launch a few days prior to the campaign. No matter how much you plan the launch, things can happen and you should build in a few days to work out any bugs prior to driving tons of traffic to the site.