A Comprehensive Guide to Website Redesign

The explosive growth of modern technologies like computers, the internet, and smartphones have provided businesses with a new way to reach their customers. Therefore, every business whether small, big or medium-size is using websites to serve their customers and exploit new opportunities today. We have composed this blog to provide you with complete information about the website redesign.

Significance of website design

There are a host of factors that help to establish a successful online presence of a business. The design and structure of a website is a crucial factor that might make or break a website’s presence. You cannot use a basic website to represent your company or organization instead you need a robust web portal that would distinguish your business from others. The look and feel of your site have an impact on the end-users. Thus, it should be both compelling and performance-driven to provide novel experience to the users. With the help of a good website designing company, you can design and create an outstanding website for your business.

What is the website redesign?

Today, 75% of people judge the credibility of your site based on the overall aesthetics and appearance. Further, performance and user engagement are the two important metrics to determine the effectiveness of your website design. If your website is unable to attract visitors and not generating proper leads and conversions, then you can decide to redesign your website. You need to start with proper research and planning to redesign it successfully. Before understanding these strategies let’s spread some light on what website redesigning means.

As the name suggests itself, website re-design is the process to redesign an existing website to give it a fresh look and feel. However, redesigning a website doesn’t always mean to completely rebuild the site but it also includes little tweaks and adjustments into its layout, structure, content, or other aspects. To give an example of website re-design, if you have a WordPress website that is years old and built with old concepts, then you will need to redesign it to meet the modern users’ expectations. You will need to follow the latest concepts and technologies to redesign the WordPress website.

Another case of website redesign arises when a website is taken from one platform to another (e.g. WordPress to Drupal). In that case, the whole website has to be re-engineered as per the new platform.

Process of redesigning a website

If you are considering redesigning your site it might be because it’s outdated and you want a change, or you want to tackle the decreasing conversion and stagnant traffic by creating a new experience. Whatever be the cause, redesigning your website can solve it but if done wrongly it can also ruin the business. Website redesign works with a clear process which is as follows.

Phase 1: Research & Analysis

If you are planning to redesign your website start with your customers in mind. With little research and analysis work, you can redesign the site with success. Begin by determining where you stand now. Many website design company start their work with this phase. Audit your website to find weak points
also analyze competitors to find what missing on your site. Gather inspiration to adopt the industry best practices for website design. Ask questions like What layouts are best for your industry? Do you need a store? What type of imagery do you need?

Phase 2: Strategy & Planning

A website represents your business so it should be coherent to the values and the style of your brand. After having deep research and analysis of your site and competitors’ sites, the next phase is to strategize and make a perfect plan for the website redesign. You need to chalk out a redesign plan as per your brand guidelines and styles.

Your planning & strategy may include:

• Plan a budget

• Determine the project scope

• Hire professionals

• Redesign and launch

You should observe your site from the four angles:

Conversion

Once visitors land on your homepage, what do they see? Can they clearly know what industry you are in? Is the information visitors seeking available on your website? If you don’t have an answer to any of these questions, you need to first define the user personas or the target audience your site will hit. Define your objectives and set your goals. Refer to the following points:

• Determine what call-to-actions you want and what would be their order on a page.

• Who are your customers and how will they find you?

• What differentiates you from competitors?

• Is there a tagline that describes your unique service?

• Use testimonials on your site.

These are a few points to assess your website and what you want to achieve with the redesign. By keeping the conversion in mind you can create a conversion based website from the outset.

Usability

The best websites strengthen the brand authority while providing an engaging experience and easy navigation to users. No matter how appealing and decorative your web page design is, if it’s usability is poor its worth is nothing. Usability is all about the performance, presentation, and functionality of a website. UI/UX is vital for every website that should be taken with utter care. The UI/UX, navigation, speed, responsiveness, menus, and layout, all these are the factors that form website usability. Start by defining a proper customer journey on your site and building a sitemap. These are a few points to consider to build a website with high usability:

• Is your website easy to use and navigate for a user?

• Your website should have user-friendly features and functionalities.

• Improve page loading time.

• Maintain consistency in the layout and structure of webpages on your site.

• Is your website responsive and cross-browser compatible?

• Eliminate ambiguity and offer consistent navigation.

• Use images aptly.

• Are you using optimized graphics?

Content

If visitors on your website can find the information they are looking for, then your website nails it. In case they don’t, then you need to come up with an effective content strategy. Content should be engaging, precise, easy-to-read, and relevant to your visitors. Your existing website may require to add new pages or consolidate pages that seem unnecessary. Depending on the page needs you may require new content or update the existing ones.

• Is your content relevant to your audience?

• Should the information provided in the content be updated?

• Does the content on your site have a distinctive voice and is it consistent throughout the information?

• Does the content include proper headlines, paragraphs, bullet points, blank spaces and is it easy to scan and read?

• Is the font readable?

SEO

Search engine optimization is important for the visibility of your site on the internet. If your website is perfectly optimized for search engines, users will be able to find it easily and quickly. A website redesign company can help you redesign your site and SEO is preserved for outperforming pages that keep the online visibility intact. Having a professional knowledge, the company create SEO-friendly design, build a new sitemap and update text content, if necessary. Also, you will want to keep your URL structure the same as much as possible.

Phase 3: Design & Development

Now is the time to bring the design team into action to create your website layout and design mockups. All the data and planning that has been gathered and prepared in the above steps come to use in this phase. Adopt the content-first approach for website design to build more intuitive and user-friendly websites. When the design mockups meet your expectations, the next step is to develop the site. After your approval, your web development company will create the site as per the new ideas and concepts implemented in the design. The new website will have a design aligned to your business needs and with a mobile responsive setup. It is the phase to choose the right fonts, colors, images, and other assets that make up the visual part of your site.

Phase 4: QA & Testing

After development, the next phase involves the quality assessment of the end product. QA professionals test the website on various parameters to make sure that the final product is up to the mark. This process also involves client testing that enables the clients to test their website to ensure that everything is working fine. The process includes pixel-perfection test, unit & module testing, system compatibility testing, review/iterations, and load testing.

Phase 5: Launch & Training

After finishing the whole redesign process and clearing all the tests, the website is launched. Your website redesign services provider also provide necessary training on how you can update and edit things on the new site. This is the final phase of the whole process and the time when your redesigned website gets live on the internet.

Pro tips for the website redesign

Opting for website redesign services is a critical decision that requires careful evaluation of your problems and solutions to maximize your ROI. You can follow some points before or during the redesign of your site as follows:

Determine the pages that are most valuable

Before starting to redesign the website, you need to have a clear map of the ecosystem of your site and understand what pages should be handled with care. Based on the circumstances your pages may fall into four categories: (i) high traffic and high conversion pages, low traffic and high conversion pages, high traffic and low conversion pages, low traffic, and low conversion pages. According to the category, you would like to preserve some pages and rebuild others.

Know your visitors and their objectives

Determining the most valuable pages on your site is half of the story, the next half is about understanding who your customers are and what they want. As per research by Google a few years ago, there is four intent that drives people to a website: ‘I want to buy’, ‘I want to know’, ‘I want to go’, and ‘I want to do’. So, your visitors may land on your site to look for some information, to buy something, to learn something, know about your product or services. Identify your customer/audience and strategize accordingly.

Know what stops or propels customers

Start by analyzing the things that stop your customers from completing the desired actions. Look for ways that help you convince customers to take the desired actions. In short, explore the ‘drivers’, ‘hooks’ and ‘barriers’ of your site. Drives help drive customers to your site, hooks help them convince, and barriers are the difficulties that stop them from desired actions.

Find out issues and overall discomfort that customers feel on a page or the website and eliminate them with proper solutions. Techniques like heatmaps can help you get an understanding of user behavior and how they interact with your site.

Test new ideas and concepts

Website design services are getting more robust by adopting new ideas and concepts in design. You can try something unique and test the overall response from users by using testing methods like A/B test.

What is the cost for website redesign?

Today, technology is offering tons of options for designing and developing websites in terms of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ methods that may cost zero or a few dollars. But creating professional websites require tools and skilled teams that may cost a fortune. Website redesign cost depends on the following factors.

Time

The higher the time and energy need to be put into the project, the higher will be the cost of the project.

Expertise

Redesigning a website requires expertise in the field of graphics design, copywriting, designing, development, marketing strategy, SEO, etc. So, the cost may rise depending on what expertise you require in your project.

Customization

When you pay for results and not for the service obtained, the cost gets higher. It means the more customization you need in your site, the higher the cost you will incur.

The cost of a website redesign depends on your project requirement, it may be $0 with DIY methods and it might be $25,000 or more with professional services.

Advantages of redesigning a website

The website redesign is just about updating the values, mission, and vision of your company, and adding new products or services to gain potential visitors and customers. Redesigning your site enables you to align the website with the technological trends and make it future-ready.

The following are some ways that web redesign services can help:

• Boost conversion, increase sales and gain more customers.

• Enhance the online visibility of a website.

• Communicate more effectively with Web 2.0 standards.

• Increase the performance and usability of a website.

• Make a website compatible with devices of different screen resolutions.

• Make a website compatible with all modern web browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Opera.

• Enhance website navigation, provide additional features and make the website more user-friendly.

• Keep the website up-to-date with the latest technologies.

• Make the website highly accessible for all kinds of users and meet the latest web standards.

These are just a few examples, there are many more benefits that your business can avail with a corporate website redesign project. Website redesigning is not just about giving your site a fresh look and feel, but it also preparing an up-to-date vision of your business.

Final notes

The website redesign is not a onetime process, instead, it is incessant because design practices are always changing, so are the customer preferences, browser technologies, and web accessibility standards. You will always focus on your customers’ needs and the latest standards then adapt your website accordingly for sustainable business growth. If you want help with your website redesign, you can trust Sparx IT Solutions for this. As a prominent website redesign company, we are known for our high-value ideas and solutions. Having 10+ years in the web development industry, we deliver out-of-the-box solutions using the industry best practices.