Does your website need a facelift?
If you think that your website looks like something out of the 1990s, or its simply not performing as it should, you might have decided on a website redesign. But where do you start?!
Any good business has a strategy. Setting a strategy is what makes a business successful. It is what will make your website redesign a success. Here at Cleverfrog Web Design Reading we know that redesigning your website starts with good strategy.
Strategy step 1: Know your audience
Do you know your audience? As a successful business owner, you should already know your demographic. Long-term successful online businesses grow from knowing who is on the other side of the screen and appealing to them.
Strategy step 2: Identify the weaknesses of your current website
Prior to rebuilding your website is a perfect time to find all the weak links and cracks in your current website. Is it that traffic isn’t being directed to your website correctly? Or are they getting to your website and not staying there long enough to make an enquiry? If you are unsure of what the issues are, ask a website agency, business colleagues or even clients what their opinions are.
Strategy step 3: Identify your websites strengths
The redesign does not necessarily mean needing to get rid of everything you have on your page and build a new page. Redesigning your website can just mean modifying it slightly. Which means it is imperative to keep what is showing up to be your best performers. If your homepage has been performing well, you may want to keep that but just change up the copy a bit. Or maybe you should just keep the colour scheme and change out the graphics. Or only modify the colour scheme and keep the copy.
Strategy step 4: Check out the competition
Redesigning your website can be the best thing you do for your website. But how does it compare to your competitors? Have you checked? Make a list of all of the elements you like from your competitor websites and see if its possible to have these incorporated in your redesign.
Strategy step 5: Search engine optimisation
You might be after a website redesign because you simply aren’t listing in the major search engines such as google. If you aren’t ranking well then you can probably guarantee that you aren’t getting any natural organic traffic from your website, but instead getting only traffic through direct clicks (such as from an email signature) or from referral sites such as Facebook.
If you have a beautiful new website, this is absolutely the best time to get your website design search engine optimised, and hopefully get you ranked on the first page of google for the largest search volume. While you are looking at refreshing your content your website designer can help optimise that content, as well as doing lots of things on the backend of your website to help propel your search position when you go live with your new website.