Are you in the process of transforming your website? Upgrading your website presence with a professional web design agency can enhance your customer experience, providing clear communication and branding to guide them.
Redesigning a website can be a delicate project, especially if the company fails to determine the objectives to achieve. Indeed, crafting a new website for your brand comes with a clear definition of what a successful website should be. Determining what success looks like enables the business to set up KPIs and monitor the performance and ROI of the new website. Therefore, you want to clarify these 5 things ahead of a redesign project:
#1. Cohesive branding matters
Your website is only one of the many platforms where your brand appears. From social media to offline presence, branding cohesion is a priority. Approaching a new website requires detailed attention to elements of the brand, including your logo, your color palette, and your tone of voice. While each branded cluster must be meaningful and able to exist as a stand-alone presence, your brand identity must also remain the same throughout the ensemble.
#2. Address existing technical issues
Upgrading your current website is more than a change of look and feel. The new site must also target essential technical factors that affect your visitors’ experience:
- Page load time
- Browser incompatibility
- Non-responsive design
- 404 links
- cyber security and HTTPS
#3. New content or maintaining the existing content
Changing your website could be the perfect opportunity to evaluate content quality and get rid of non-effective pages. For example, if you have an existing blog that fails to attract readers or that is out-of-date, it can be a fantastic idea to start from fresh. Before eliminating content, however, you want to establish which of your pages drove the most traffic. The content of these can be retained, or they can be part of a redirect project so visitors of the former website can still find them despite the new design.
#4. Improve usability experience
Usability experience, a part of UX design, refers to designing a website that works to address your visitors’ needs. Guidance is available to understand better what visitors expect from a website. However, each website audience is unique. Therefore, you will need to research and test a variety of solutions to figure out what works best for your audience group. It is essential to introduce usability testing throughout the web redesign project. Experts recommend a number of testing methods:
- Performance testing: Give web users a task to accomplish on the website and monitor their progress.
- Tree sorting: Create a visual information hierarchy of the website and ask web users to complete a task using the tree display.
- Card sorting: Provide web users with cards describing the main website sections and ask them to structure them into a meaningful architecture.
- Eye tracking: Monitor where web users’ eyes land on the pages with specialist tools.
- 5-second test: Show web users a page for 5 seconds and ask them to answer questions about it.
#5. Optimize each page for SEO
Aside from technical SEO factors, on-page optimization also includes keywords placements, meta descriptions, H titles, alt texts, etc. Work hand-in-hand with SEO experts to optimize your content accordingly.
Are you ready to transform your web presence with an engaging and exciting new website? Make sure your web redesign also includes essential considerations such as branding, SEO, usability, and content retention.
