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Redesigning Your Website? Here is a 5-Step Checklist

by | Jul 4, 2013 | Articles, Web Design, Web Development | 1 comment

Redesigning Your Website? Here is a 5-Step Checklist

If you are thinking of redesigning your website, that’s quite a task you are undertaking and depending on your approach to the process, your website redesign can prove to be a massive success or a big fat failure. So how do you undertake a website redesign so you can guarantee a smooth experience and a successful outcome? Is there a template that you can follow?

As a matter of fact, there is! It’s not so much a template. It’s more like a guide.

Every website redesign should start with a clear vision. Why do you want to redesign your website? Is there a specific problem that you wish to deal with?

The earlier on you define your goals, the more targeted you can make the entire process and the more successful you can expect your outcome to be.

redesigning your website

The 7 Steps of a Successful Website Redesign are as follows:

  1. Strategy
  2. Plan
  3. Design
  4. Build
  5. Optimize
  6. Launch
  7. Analyze

Clearly the later 6 stages depend on how effective your initial website redesign strategy is. This is the most important aspect.

Guide to an Effective Website Redesign Strategy

1. Analyze your current metrics

Because having a clear goal is the most important thing when you are redesigning a website, before you embark on a website redesign, you should know how your current one is doing. Analyze:

–       The number of visitors, the bounce rate

–       Time on site

–       The best keywords and the number of inbound links

–       The number of new leads v/s sales

–       The number of indexed pages and pages that receive the most traffic

If you don’t have these figures at hand, there is very little chance that you know what’s wrong with your current website and without knowing what the problem is; you can’t possibly come up with a fix.

P.S If you are using multiple tools for tracking the performance of your website, you want to make a note of the tools you are using. When you are done redesigning your website, you will need to re-use the same tools to analyze the new metrics. For accurate data collection, you don’t want to compare apples to bananas.

2. Define your goal/goals

If you are thinking of redesigning your website, you probably have a reason for it other than you dreamt about it a couple of weeks ago. To make sure that your website redesign is a success, you need to have a compelling reason for a redesign and no, “it’s been too long” does not qualify as a good enough reason to redesign a website.

When it comes to online marketing, how a website looks is important but more important than that is how usable it is. Before you redesign your website, be clear about your ultimate goals which may be any of the following:

–       Increasing the number of visitors to your site or reducing the bounce rate

–       Improving your domain authority

–       Increasing your number of leads or sales

–       Better rankings in the SERPs

3. Define your message

A website needs to be consistent in terms of branding so before a website redesign, you need to be clear about the message you want to communicate. When a new visitor lands on your website, he or she should not have to somehow figure out what it is that you do and how your website is relevant to their search query. Your message should be clear and concise.

As you design your business branding, remember to keep your language and tone both coherent and concise. Avoid industry jargon that makes you sound smart to your own ears but will make no sense to real people.

4. Know your customers

When people land on your website pages from the search engine results, the first thing they ask themselves is this: How is this website relevant to my search query? Your job is to answer that question before the visitors click “Back”. Clearly, when you develop a website redesign strategy, you need to keep in mind your buyer personas. The design of your website and the content you generate should both match your customer demographics. Your business branding should align with your target audience.

5. Protect your pages

Last but not least, when redesigning your website, be sure to document your search engine optimized pages. At the end of the day, all your site’s metrics depend on a first principle: Getting found online.

To document your most important pages, you can choose to use your marketing analytics to identify the pages with the most traffic or inbound links. If your redesign involves moving any of these valued pages around, you need to create appropriate 301 redirects.

About 301 redirects, this is also something you need to be mindful of when redesigning a website. To make sure you don’t lose valuable traffic or links, you need to map out your 301 redirects for proper technical implementation later on.

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Author Bio – Sameer Panjwani, the author of this article writes on behalf of Directory Maximizer, a premier link building company offering services like general directory submissions, niche submissions, paid directory submissions, guest blogging, social bookmarking etc. For more details on how our content writing services can help build your brand, get in touch with us today.

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