How to Redesign a Website Keeping the Essentials in Mind?

Image: istock.com

Is it time for a website redesign?
 
A quick way to answer this is whether you say yes to any of the following questions.

• Has it been a long time since you designed your site?
• Have you seen fewer and fewer visitors and less engagement?
• Are your load times lagging?
• Have there been big updates in your market?
• Has the focus of your business or organization changed?

User Experience
 
The user experience of your site is one of the most important elements, and it encompasses several different features. Everything from the layout to the legibility of your text plays a part in the UX.
 
Obviously, if you’re redesigning your site, the goal will be to upgrade your user experience. This is especially important with a business site that is centered around generating leads or encouraging active engagement from your customers, whether that means enhancing customer service or facilitating product purchase.
 
You can upgrade your UX by redesigning elements such as the following:

• Typeface choice. Use text that is easy to read and highly legible.
• Load times. Optimize your content and especially your visuals in order to keep your load times as fast as possible.
• Color choices. The colors you choose for your background can enhance — or detract from — the legibility of your text and the appeal of your visuals.
• Customer support. Making sure that your customers get the help they need is a huge part of the overall UX on your site. Ensure that your contact information is readily available, and consider including upgrades like chatbots and live agents ready to help with questions or concerns.

 
Landing Page
 
Landing pages are, hands down, one of the greatest ways to upgrade your website design while retaining and boosting your ability to generate leads. Why?
 
Simply put, landing pages are specifically created for marketing and advertising purposes. They include calls to action, highlight sales and incentives, provide a shortcut to customers who already know what they want, and often use lead-getting tactics such as asking for an email address from new customers.
 
Best of all, landing pages are usually quite simple, and can be adapted and upgraded as needed. If you need a different set of lead-generating questions, they’re easy enough to include in the design. If you have a new promotion, you can include that, too. They’re simple, light on content, and easy to adapt.
 
If you’ve been thinking about adding a landing page to your site, this is the time to educate yourself a little further on how many benefits there are to both you as the web owner and to your customers.
 
Branding
 
One of the most important facets of a site design — or redesign — is the visual appeal. And a big part of that is tied in with your existent branding.
 
Harmonious branding is an important part of retaining your existing customers. If you change your branding too quickly or too drastically, you could run the risk of alienating those who are already familiar with your brand. It’s always a good idea, if you’re planning to change your brand a lot, to let your customers know beforehand so they aren’t taken aback by the alterations.
 
At the same time, pick a few details to keep consistent. For instance, include your consultancy website logo on the top left hand corner of the website. It’s a common practice and helps visitors to the site to readily identify where they are, reducing the risk of a drastic new redesign confusing the customer.
 
Mobile-Friendliness
 
Every year, the statistics on mobile usage versus laptop or desktop usage continue to climb. The simple fact is that there are more and more internet users turning to their smartphones in order to surf the web wherever they’re at rather than waiting until they get home and using their computers.
 
At the same time, the majority of business website owners have not optimized their sites for mobile use.
 
We’ve all had the experience of visiting a website on our phones and finding that it isn’t designed for use on that platform. Navigation is typically difficult, images and text are often out of perspective or alignment, and it can be incredibly difficult to input information or make a purchase.
 
Obviously, if you want to keep your lead-generating statistics, it’s important to make sure your redesigned website is optimized for visitors who are viewing it on their laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
 
SEO Keywords
 
A last essential to a well-designed website is ensuring that your content is not only top-notch and trustworthy, but that it also makes the most of SEO keywords that are traffic-generating for your market.
 
Search engine optimized content boosts the overall user experience and enhances engagement, making it easier to draw in visitors who will then generate more leads for your business. While written content tends to fall by the wayside in a major web redesign, it is nonetheless an important factor.
 
To have an effective, well-designed site that continues to generate leads, attention needs to be paid to each of the five essentials listed above. If you take each of these into account throughout your redesign, you can be sure to take advantage of lead-generating features that will boost the effectiveness of your site and the growth of your company.
 
Author Bio
When not working on website projects, Cynthia Adam loves to write about web design, web development and how to market them. Her writing aims to ease the process of web design and web development for other website owners.