If you’re a website owner, chances are that once in a while you will be looking for website redesign services.
On the other hand, if you are a designer, you need to know how to redesign a website properly and have a checklist with a well defined process.
Technology is always evolving and the web design industry is a proof of that.
Every once in a while, a new web tech is launched and changes the ways of creating web sites.
CSS3 and HTML5 did that a few years back and after that web designers started to modify the way they worked because clients were asking for modern websites.
There are also a lot more reasons than tech advancements in the web industry that make it necessary to redesign constantly.
There is also human evolution in terms of web usage, involvement with social media and interaction between the visitors, factors that should be taken into consideration when redesigning.
Image source: Gene Ross
Designers and design blogs usually get a redesign once a year, or once in two years, but a big redesign can’t be done yearly on huge sites. It is easier to redesign a portfolio or a blog than an ecommerce site that handles a lot of data.
But even if you have to redesign a small or big website, there are a few questions that you need to ask yourself about the site makeover and plan ahead what to do, how to do, and why do it.
The best advice I could give about this is to follow the website design best practices that you can find online.
The current situation
You will have on your site elements that perform well and others that don’t work at all. You have to check everything in terms of usability and identify what could be improved. Making things user-friendly and usable is a must because your site results depend on the experience that the users have while interacting with the site.
There’s a pretty good old advice: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t mess around with elements of your site that work and deliver you the expected results.
Instead, just do a makeover but make sure that there will be the same user experience. The elements that don’t work at all should be repositioned or removed completely.
I’ve seen a couple of redesigns over the years and a few of them have been disastrous. A well planned strategy is a must. Redesigning just for the sake of it is stupid, especially when a website redesign cost is a big one for a large site.
You will have to monitor how your site is used by visitors and how they are interacting with it.
Use Google Analytics, Hotjar, CrazyEgg or other similar tools to see what pages are the most visited and what elements are clicked. Also, sales conversions, bounce rate, time on site, keywords and new leads should be documented and compare to what they will be after the redesign.
After documenting everything you will have to plan and determine your goals that you wish to achieve with the upcoming redesign. For example, increasing the number of visitors, reducing bounce rate, increasing time on site, increasing the number of leads and, most importantly, increasing the amount of sales that your site generates.
The best time to redesign
It is wrong to think that redesigning means only new graphics. The redesign process also involves changing more or less the structure of the site to get a better performance.
If you are experiencing a drop in traffic and sales, your site design could be responsible.
That doesn’t mean that in any case the site’s design is responsible for this, but if everything else works fine, than the design, most likely, is the problem.
If your website is not responsive, make it responsive. Use tools and resources to create a responsive website.
Having a responsive website is a must these days because a lot of people prefer browsing sites on a tablet or phone, when they’re at a coffee shop, in the public transport or at work.
Mobile web usage is something that is growing by extreme leaps and bounds today. Therefore, with this truth in mind, you do need to make sure that your website is able to be accessed by a wide range of devices. These devices do include desktops, laptops, tablets, and also smartphones.
When you incorporate responsive design into your new website, you will not only be assured of reaching a much broader audience, but this would be something that may not happen if your website isn’t at all mobile-friendly.
If your site takes a long time to load and there are a lot of elements which burden the structure, you have to make modifications. A good advice would be to use sprites, cache methods and minify your files in the new design.
Take your customers’ feedback into consideration and if you notice that their feedback is negative, then you will surely have to do things differently. You will see this way directly from your audience which parts of the site are working and which are not.
Doing a website redesign can indeed be a giant project to take on personally. You may decide to put it off for certain reasons.
What are these certain reasons? They can be about money and time involved. However, doing a redesign of this type, can truly be a worthy investment on all fronts. This is because your website is the one marketing tool that does make a difference.
Your website just doesn’t work or won’t work at all
All of this may seem obvious to you, but in reality, it is something that you may have stumbled on where other websites are concerned. There are existing websites out there that are dysfunctional. Your own website may not be on this level though.
However, it may not be, as user friendly as it normally should be either. Some websites do have elements that are not effective at all. They can be the very thing to render your website very ineffective, which you may not even notice, to be honest.
Image source: Tema Troinoi
Functionality should always come first. It should be the one and only primary focus for you. If it isn’t this at all, it can affect your overall traffic, as well as, for lead generation attempts. You never want your traffic and lead generation to suffer.
Just how you, as well as others, do go about testing your site will answer all the questions you need as far as redesigning a website does go.
They will clearly point you in the direction of a redesign very strongly. The website design process will differ accordingly with every individual website on the average.
You aren’t getting the overall results you want
It doesn’t matter if your website is gorgeous, highly functional, and pixel perfect in every way. Awesome! However, if it isn’t getting the results, which you do expect to be getting from it. All it is, in essence, is nothing but useless web real estate.
A website for an individual or business should be something that exists primarily to build up one’s customer base in actuality. It should also show that your data is pretty much trending in the direction of that area specifically.
To make usability a whole lot better
Image source: Vivek Venkatraman
You want your site visitors to always be able to find what they are seeking to find. If they don’t find it, they may become very unhappy, and this can prove to be the very thing to drive them away for good.
If this is the case, and what your website is presently about, you do want to change this up immediately. The best way to do this is by making your website more user-friendly in detail and approach. Your new website redesign must be user-friendly in every way.
It should prove to be something to make both your customers and prospects happy.
Image source: Oykun Yilmaz
A few of the questions you should be asking to help you in your process of redesign:
- Does your call to action plan promote change visitors into leads and these leads into customers?
- Do the landing pages of your website inspire visitors to want to read more, as well as, to learn more? Do they make one want to dig deeper and explore? Are they just landing pages that are aesthetically pleasing and have very little value other than that?
- Does your site have far too much text in it? Is it bullet-ridden with nothing but corporate speak and that is it?
- Does your website have a look and feel that matches your company’s particular voice and is capable of speaking very clearly towards your target audience?
SEO
SEO is pretty important to everyone because getting found online is not that easy as a regular person might think. Having a good SEO strategy is very important if you want visitors to come to your site through search engines and increase leads, conversions and sales.
The biggest SEO problem when redesigning appears when you move the site from one CMS to another. Why? Because the URLs might change and that’s a really bad things in terms of SEO. You will have to inform the search engines of the new links. Failing to do this will results in a huge drop in traffic and sales. To alert the search engines that you URLs have changes, use 301 redirects.
If your site is already optimized for search engines, keep it that way with all your headings and keywords, if not, optimize your new site design for search engines. Another issue that appears when moving from a CMS to another is the individual page optimization. Be careful not to lose the optimization for each page cause that might give you an incredible amount of headaches.
Redesign your website to be useful
Image source: Mattias Johansson
If you have finally decided to redesign an existing website, it is also a great time to do some detailed measuring and research. Hopefully, your site will already have Google Analytics built into it, this way you can take full advantage of this.
You need to determine what makes your website work and what doesn’t work with it exactly. Just where are your visitors going when they frequent your site? Are they turning into real sales or are they dropping off at a certain point?
Data is the one key to make a difference. Learn all that you can from it. Always look ahead at what the other guy is doing (your competition). Whatever your competitor is doing, try to match it, or go beyond it if you can. Try to improve on your site as much as possible.
You don’t have to be an expert to make a high-performing website. You just need to have a arsenal of some good working tools and be committed to constantly testing and improving on what you already do have.
Still, let’s not hurry with redesigning the website
If you operate a website for personal use or a business, chances are you may be due for a redesign. But where exactly do you begin? If you’re looking to start your project off on the right foot, there are numerous UX activities that you can take advantage of.
One of these activities is referred to as competitive usability testing, which are usability studies of not only the existing website design, but also several competitor websites. Whatever you do, do not decide to just hop on your computer and begin the redesigning process immediately.
If you find that you need to redesign your website, you will still want to hang on to the original design so that you can learn from it, as well as use it as a starting point for your new design.
Before proceeding with redesigning your website, figure out exactly just how big of a change you will need to make. If you are part of an Agile team, you will want to consider competitive usability testing, which will need to be performed during sprint zero.
The best prototype to use for your new website is your old one, as it solves the problem of designing a website for your business.
By looking at your old website, you will be able to determine exactly what is bad about it so that your new website will not suffer the same issues.
In addition, you will want to determine what people actually like about the old design so that those qualities can be incorporated into the new design.
What you need to ask yourself before starting to redesign
Set a goal for the new design
Before beginning the process of redesigning your website, take the time to really think about your content. This will allow you to become more clear about exactly what it is that you want your new website to achieve.
The clearer you are about the actions that each user should take, the easier the design process will be. As a result, both you and the users of your website will be satisfied with the overall results.
What’s working and what’s not
Before going on with the redesigning process, think about what aspects of the website that you want to keep and which ones you want to toss out. Make note of any past complaints from users, as well as any information that you can obtain from a service such as Google Analytics.
The best example would be to see which portions of your website have seen a drop in the number of users. If this is the case, come up with ideas that can help raise their interest.
This is where you will really want to dig into any available data instead of simply relying on your own instinct.
What to focus on
Things that can cause you to get easily distracted when redesigning your website are things such as extremely creative graphical elements, which really are not needed.
This is mainly for business owners who “want it all” right away; however, a website must evolve just as the web itself must evolve.
It’s also important to keep in mind that your website will never be truly “finished”; rather, focus on what you will absolutely need, then continue to make the necessary changes and additions along the way.
Competitive usability testing. Learning from your competition
The method of competitive usability testing is used to determine how well your website performs in comparison to the websites of other individuals. This can be holistic (ranking) or more focused (comparing elements, features, etc.).
These kinds of evaluations can take the form of expert reviews, which is when someone experienced in competitive usability testing reviews website designs based on their own expertise and knowledge of usability. This usually involves the user using two or more competing websites to complete a set of certain tasks.
A thorough evaluation will allow the website design team to determine exactly what works and what doesn’t, all from the perspective of either an expert or a user of the website. This is more useful than you simply looking at the website of a competitor to figure out what you think is different and/or interesting about it, as well as see what they’re doing overall.
These kinds of evaluation will allow you to properly assess not only if the design of your website is better or worse than that of your competitors, but also discover the many strengths and weaknesses of completing designs. The overall goal is to determine what your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not, and how they’re going about their designing.
These evaluations are also great activities for initial research on projects, as they can help in determining exactly what direction a design needs to go in or how great of a need there is for feature development.
Make sure that the following goals are clear in the evaluation: what main website redesign challenges do you have? What features used by your competitors are the most interesting to you? What is the biggest feature on your website that you want to compare to other websites?
What you can gain from it
Competitive usability testing evaluations can assist the design team in making decisions about what specific elements work the best rather than thoughts based on personal opinions.
Other benefits of these evaluations are risk reduction, which will help you to eliminate features that are pushed too hard on your website. Tackle this issue early on, taking advantage of the opportunity to look at competing websites, as these are often found to be early adopters.
Besides that, usability testing can also help you add value, which can assist you in adding design approaches or other features that users can identify as being helpful to them.
Analyzing the competitors
Based on the usability work of your different competitors, the design team will be able to obtain these kinds of insights. Show yourself the various strengths and weaknesses of a design that may have already gone through one or more rounds of competitive usability testing.
This will allow the team to benefit from work that has already been performed by your competitors. Before completing any design work for your website, consider having one of these evaluations performed in order to test several approaches to a similar design by a competitor.
Evaluations also accurately reflect what your customers already do, as they compare things such as content, experience, and overall functionality that your website offers as opposed to what other websites offer.
Generally, people will navigate between several different websites before ultimately deciding on which business to go with. Therefore, it is very beneficial for your design team to understand what users of your website do and see as they look over your competitors.
Learn from these tests
One common issue that design teams face occasionally is debating over design solutions, using personal opinions to make decisions about various things. This is where competitive usability testing becomes essential, as it will allow the team to make more informed decisions by obtaining feedback from your website’s target users.
By looking at the websites of competitors, you will be able to solve design problems, as these websites often experience the same issues that you have. These websites are also fully-implemented design instances that numerous other companies have invested in.
Competitive usability testing can also assist you with evaluating future features of your website. Take the time to learn whether or not customers consider your website to be valuable and/or how it can be better designed. Customers’ opinions can assist you with determining whether or not certain features are worth including.
Examine similar features on competitors’ websites. While you may find features on similar websites that you’re looking to add to your own, the ones on the other websites may work slightly better. Take the time to note and identify the various elements what will work better, as well as make your website design look better, while at the same time avoiding mistakes being made on other websites.
You will most likely discover better and easier ways to do things. If you test your own website, you may find things turning out to be very well. However, testing other websites could reveal things you may not have thought about including, such as various features and customer interaction options.
People will compare and contrast these things in order to give a proper reaction to different designs, especially since they will have several different examples to look at.
Ending thoughts
In conclusion, before making the decision to redesign your website, ensure that you completely understand all of the various strengths and weaknesses that are in your current design. Make sure there are website redesign benefits and you are not redesigning just for the sake of it.
Take the time to study the websites of your competitors in order to obtain different ideas and alternatives. Also look at various website redesign examples and see what changes designers have made with websites like the one you are trying to modify.
The main focus of competitive usability testing is to gain more of an insight as to why different design elements work or not, which will allow you to make more informed decisions as you move forward.
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