There are several steps to a website redesign but here are four very practical and important steps that you don’t want to forget. If your website design company doesn’t talk about these four steps you need to find a new company. Please contact us for a PDF of our full website design and development process.
Here are the four important steps that every website redesign should go through:
1. Website Analytics
History is an important part of your visitor’s behavior. We use this information to help us understand how your visitors are currently interacting with your site. We look for things like bounce rate, entrance pages, exit pages, number of unique visitors, returning visitors, transactions, form submissions, total sales/leads, etc. This snap shot gives us some insight on what needs to change in the redesign but also provides a baseline to compare to after the new design is in production.
2. Persona Development
You are more than likely not your customer. It’s important that everyone understand who your best customers are. We create a persona for the top 3-5 customers. These persona’s include things like demographic information, psychographic information, needs, motivators, products/services used, decision criteria, etc. We take these personas and create task flows and use those to design the information architecture of your site. It’s important that your best customers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
3. Maintain Your Assets
You may have content on your site that’s old or outdated. You need to inventory your site and look at the content to make sure it’s still relevant. The other big thing to do is to know which pages on your current site have SEO value. If you create a new site with new pages you’ll lose all the SEO value from high-ranking pages on your current site. We perform an SEO analysis for you to identify those pages and create 301 redirects to make sure you maintain your SEO value.
4. Call to Action
Some people do a great job of explaining their products/services but never invite the visitor to take the next step. Sometimes it just takes a little prodding to turn a visitor into a customer. By call to action we don’t mean displaying your phone number on every page. We mean providing something of value to your visitor, we call it the Value Exchange. You provide something of value to your best customers (this is where your personas come in) and in exchange they give you their contact information. Typically we ask them for their email and send them the thing of value to their email or we send an email with a link to the thing of value. The value is different for each company. It might be a list of the top 10 things to think about before they make a decision, it could be a free trial, membership to a club that receives private information, etc. You need to test the value part to see what resonates the most with each persona.
I hope this has helped. We would love to tell you more about our process and how we create user-friendly websites and mobile websites. If we can help just give us a call at (816) 529-9000.