A website is your best online salesperson. It says everything about your business. It is here that you promote your products and services extensively to attract the right prospects from across the globe.
Now, just as you keep reinventing or evolving your business strategies, you need to assess your site’s performance regularly.
As you analyze your website, you may identify specific problems that prompt you to go in for a website redesign.
What is a website redesign?
A website redesign refers to the process of making significant changes and improvements to an existing website's design, layout, functionality, and content.
It involves reevaluating and enhancing various aspects of the website to achieve specific goals such as improving the user experience, updating the visual aesthetics, aligning with current trends and technologies, optimizing for search engine results, and boosting conversions.
During a website redesign, the entire structure and appearance of the website may be revamped. Additionally, the content may be revised, reorganized, or expanded to ensure it remains relevant and engaging to the target audience.
A website redesign may be a simple or complicated process based on the reasons and requirements. We’ll discuss more about the reasons why businesses opt to redesign their websites.
Why redesign your website?
Businesses redesign their websites for several reasons. The main focus, though, is their marketing goal. The most common reasons are rebranding, lead generation, and improvement in the user experience. We have attempted to mention a few of them here.
Outdated design
One primary reason for a website redesign is to update its appearance and align it with current design trends. If a website looks outdated, it may give the impression that the business is not up-to-date or technologically advanced. Users may have trust issues browsing through outdated websites. A fresh design can help improve the user experience and make the website more visually appealing.
Improved user experience
Websites should be user-friendly and intuitive, allowing visitors to easily navigate and find the information they need. A website redesign can focus on enhancing the user experience by optimizing site structure, improving navigation menus, simplifying forms, and making the website more responsive across different devices.
Mobile responsiveness
With the increasing use of mobile devices, businesses need to ensure their websites are mobile-friendly. If a website is not optimized for mobile devices, it can result in a poor user experience and a potential loss of customers. Redesigning a website with a responsive design ensures it adapts to different screen sizes and provides a seamless experience on smartphones and tablets.
Rebranding
Over time, businesses may undergo changes in their brand identity, mission, or target audience. A website redesign allows them to update their branding elements, such as logos, color schemes, and typography, to reflect the current brand image. It also provides an opportunity to refine the messaging and align it with the business's current goals and values.
Functionality and features
As technology evolves, new website features and functionalities become available. A website redesign can incorporate these advancements to enhance the website's functionality and offer new capabilities. For example, integrating e-commerce functionality, adding a blog, or incorporating social media feeds can improve user engagement and support business objectives.
SEO optimization
SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for organizations looking to increase their online exposure and generate organic visitors. A website redesign can focus on optimizing the site's structure, metadata, URLs, and content (both text and visual) to improve search engine rankings.
Performance and speed
A slow website! You know, for sure, that you’ll be losing customers if you don’t work on improving it. Your slow-loading website can lead to high bounce rates and dissatisfied visitors. Website redesigns to improve load speed often prioritize performance optimization, including code optimization, image compression, caching mechanisms, and server improvements. Enhancing website speed and performance ensures a smooth browsing experience and positively impacts search engine rankings.
Integration with tools
Businesses have a ton of other software tools for customer management, productivity improvement, marketing automation, employee management, third-party APIs, and other stuff. Some of these tools require integration with the website. A website redesign can streamline these integrations, enabling efficient data exchange and automation.
Now, if you are using a platform like the no-code web builder Dotcom, you don’t have to worry about all this as such platforms are built for customization, flexibility, and scalability. However, if you have built your website from scratch by coding, you may need strategies in place for a complete overhaul.
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10 steps to redesign your existing website
While redesigning your website, ensure you don’t repeat the mistakes you made on your current website! With every day bringing in new innovations in website development, use new tools to build your website and make it business-ready for the future. Here are a few steps to keep in mind while redesigning your existing website.
1. Define goals and objectives
Begin by carefully identifying your website makeover goals and objectives. Determine what you want to achieve through the redesign, such as improving the user experience, increasing conversions, or aligning with new branding. We have already mentioned the reasons why businesses go in for website redesign. Setting clear goals will guide the entire redesign process. Also, focus on these three main criteria:
Usability
Conversion
Engagement
Once you have a clear objective, it will be easier to move on to the next logical step.
2. Conduct a website audit
Perform a thorough audit of your current website to identify its strengths, weaknesses, and areas that need improvement. Evaluate its design and assess whether the design elements engage visitors and guide them seamlessly through the site, or does it need some revamping.
Similarly, study the content and functionality and spot the dull and outdated features that are hindering the user experience. Focus on the overall functionality, performance, and SEO. Gather feedback from users, analyze website analytics, and consider usability testing to gain insights into user behavior and preferences for the existing website.
3. Do your user research
User research for a website redesign varies from that of a new website. It begins with a thorough assessment of your existing website. You then rely heavily on gathering feedback from current website users. Surveys, feedback on the shopping experience, usability testing, and website analysis provide insights into user behaviors, pain points, and preferences. This data helps you identify content gaps that require improvement and opportunities to align the content with user needs.
4. Develop a redesign strategy
Based on the website audit findings, user research, and your goals, create a comprehensive redesign strategy. Define the target audience clearly, outline the key features and functionalities required, and determine the overall design direction. Consider factors like mobile responsiveness, the user journey, and content structure.
Establish what can be kept from the existing website and what has to be changed. Instead of starting from an entirely new blank canvas, reuse content or images that are driving visitors to the site. For instance, if the content on certain pages is good, use them with a slight tweak.
Also, we recommend evolving the existing design instead of going for an entirely new one. This will keep the familiarity intact for your customers, and they will not need a steep learning curve to navigate your site. In fact, we suggest updating your site often to avoid a complete redesign.
Since you are more acquainted with website development now, it becomes easier to develop a timeline and allocate resources accordingly.
5. Plan content strategy
Assess the existing content and determine what needs to be updated, removed, or added. Create a content strategy that aligns with your goals and target audience. Content, for the most part, is neglected, and aesthetics are often given prime consideration. This attitude needs to change as visitors come to your site for content and not for the design or its underlying technology.
Start the content strategy by planning your customer’s needs rather than what you can offer them.
Plan for high-quality, engaging, and relevant content that reflects your brand identity. Consider SEO best practices while optimizing content for search engines.
6. Map the information architecture
Creating an information architecture helps you establish a visual hierarchy. By establishing a clear structure and hierarchy for your content, you ensure that users can easily find what they need and navigate through your website seamlessly.
Prioritize the development of the information architecture before diving into the visual design. This deliberate sequence allows you to align the visual hierarchy with the content organization, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
To create an effective information architecture, employ top task analysis and card sorting techniques.
Top task analysis
It involves identifying the key tasks or actions that users want to accomplish on your website. By understanding these top tasks, you can structure your website to prioritize and streamline the user journey toward those goals.
Card sorting exercise
This method involves categorizing and organizing information by sorting virtual or physical cards into groups based on your users’ expectations. By involving user needs in the process, you ensure that the resulting information architecture aligns with their mental models and addresses their questions effectively.
Now, collaborate with a designer to address the visual aspects of the redesign. By having a solid foundation in the form of information architecture, the design process becomes more focused and purposeful. You lay the groundwork for a user-centered website redesign.
7. Design and visual elements
Develop a new design concept for your website. Create wireframes and mockups to visualize the layout, structure, and user interface. When it comes to developing a new design concept for your website, utilizing a no-code website builder like Dotcom can be a game changer.
Wireframing
Start by utilizing Dotcom's drag-and-drop functionality to sketch out the basic layout and structure of your website. With its library of pre-designed elements and widgets, you can easily place and arrange them to create a clear visual representation of each page's content and functionality. Focus on organizing information and defining the hierarchy of elements to ensure a smooth user experience.
Mockups
Once the wireframes are in place, leverage Dotcom's customization options to enhance the visual appeal of your website. Experiment with different color schemes that align with your branding guidelines, and choose typography that reflects your brand's personality. Dotcom offers a wide range of fonts and customizable styles, allowing you to create a visually cohesive and engaging design concept.
User experience
Dotcom's no-code website builder empowers you to incorporate user-friendly features and optimize the overall user experience. Take advantage of its visual components to add interactive elements like menus, sliders, and buttons. Pay attention to the placement of navigation menus, ensuring easy access to key pages. Dotcom's built-in responsiveness feature ensures that your design translates seamlessly across different devices, enhancing usability.
Visual assets
Dotcom allows you to easily integrate imagery and visual assets into your design concept. Choose high-quality images that align with your brand and enhance the overall aesthetic appeal of your website. Dotcom allows you to upload your own visuals, ensuring your website reflects your unique style and messaging.
Real-time preview
Dotcom simplifies website design by enabling real-time previews of your wireframes, mockups, and initial designs. You can gather feedback, and iterate on the design concept directly within the platform. This process ensures that every design element is aligned and that any necessary adjustments can be made efficiently.
With Dotcom, you'll be able to transform your design concept into a visually stunning and user-friendly website without the need for extensive coding knowledge.
8. Implement SEO best practices
We recommend incorporating SEO best practices during the design and development process. A few factors, such as optimizing website structure, URLs, metadata, content, and headings for relevant keywords, minimizing images, and adding alt text to images, go a long way in establishing authority in website ranking.
Ensure proper indexing by search engines and implement technical SEO elements, such as sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonical tags. And, most importantly, set up redirects for any changed URLs on your new website to preserve search rankings.
9. Testing and QA
Before launching the redesigned website, conduct extensive testing to identify and fix any issues or bugs. Test the website on different devices, browsers, and screen sizes to ensure it functions properly and maintains consistency for device responsiveness.
Check for broken links, form validation, page load speed, and overall user experience. Engage real users or stakeholders to perform user acceptance testing (UAT). Let them navigate through the website, complete common tasks, and provide feedback. This helps identify any usability issues and validates that the redesign meets their expectations.
Conduct load testing and stress tests to evaluate its response time, page loading speed, and overall performance under different traffic conditions. Perform thorough quality assurance (QA) to guarantee a smooth user experience.
10. Integration with other systems
If your website is integrated with other systems or third-party tools, such as CRM systems or marketing automation tools, you have to ensure that the website redesign can streamline these integrations, ensuring efficient data transfer and automation.
Wrapping Up
A website redesign takes time, money, and effort. When undertaking a redesign, it is crucial to align it with your overall business strategy to enhance user experiences and boost conversion rates. When considering a website redesign, it's important to make a careful decision about whether to code it from scratch or utilize no-code website builders like Dotcom. This choice can enable ongoing improvements to your website over time. So, make a wise decision!
