Prepare for Your Website Redesign
7 Steps to a Successful Website Redesign
1. Define your best customers.
Interview a few of your favorite customers, make sure they are the kind of customers you’d like to attract more of.
- What are their demographics? Sex, age, income, location, etc.
- How did they learn about your business?
- Why do they like to work with or buy from you?
These answers will help you better understand your customers. and it may give you insight on where your traffic is coming from. Be sure to check your website traffic report. Is your traffic from search engines? Social media? Referrals? Email marketing?
A plan for driving traffic to your site should be considered when planning a redesign. This is important because if you’re counting on the search engines driving traffic to your site you’ll need to include an SEO service as part of the redesign. If you’re planning on social media driving traffic then you’ll want to include social sharing widgets on your site, as well as, a solid marketing plan for what and when to post.
Need help driving more traffic to your site?
2. Determine your content strategy by defining the goals of your website.
What is the primary goal of the site?
- To sell products?
- Generate contact leads?
- How many visitors do you need per day to make a sale?
- How many products do you need to sell per week? Per day?
- What’s your goal for weekly sales revenue or inquiries? Daily sales revenue or inquiries?
What’s the secondary goal of the new site?
If your customer’s goal is to research cameras and then purchase one, and your goal is to sell cameras, you might want to add to your list a secondary goal of having details specifications of your products, and maybe even customer reviews. These elements will help reinforce your first goal.
3. Do a competitive analysis.
Visit your competitors websites. Create a list of strengths and weaknesses. Compare this list to your current site. Are there any similar weaknesses on your current site. Include the items you consider a strength in your redesign, eliminate or rework all elements you consider a weakness.
5. What can the new site do to alleviate customer service inquiries?
The best place to start is to review your past customer service inquiries. And since interviewing customers is part of your redesign plan, be sure to add these customer service related questions to your interview.
Add these questions to your customer interview:
- What is your favorite thing about our site?
- What is your least favorite?
- What errors or problems have you encountered on our site?
- If so, have any of these issues prevented you from achieving your goal?
- Did you contact customer service?
- Was the issue resolved?
- If you weren’t happy with the resolution what would you have changed?
- What are some features you’d like to see on our new site?
3. Create a list of “must haves” for your website.
Compile the answers from your customer interview and competitive analysis into a list of “must haves” for the new site. Now prioritize, can they all be done in one phase or do you need a two phase approach?
Example: Links to social media, content that helps the customers decide on purchases, product comparison widget, etc.
6. Use Pinterest to create a board of design ideas you think would work well with your brand.
7. Determine your deadline for the release of the new site.
Be sure to include in your plan the marketing efforts will you use to promote the new site.
Share this research with your web designer.