Make visitors understand precisely what the topic is about, why you are addressing it, and how you will do it. Keep it short and sweet.
Businesses can spend countless hours on web development only to see little to no real improvement. While their site’s design may look pretty, important metrics like ROI, conversion rates, and traffic don’t always measure up.
These brand new websites fail to take important factors into account. When you undergo a generic “redesign,” your site only improves on the surface level. For real growth, your web design process must address deeper-level concerns such as company strategy, performance goals, and user experience.
Is it Time for a Website Redesign?
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Before you commit to a redesign project, take time to evaluate your current site thoroughly. It’s easy to look at the surface and recognize that a.) your site looks outdated or b.) your site seems reasonable enough. However, to determine whether or not it’s time for a website redesign, consider website performance metrics, current web design standards, and brand-website alignment.
Aesthetics
Maybe your website does look outdated, and you know it. Aesthetic reasons for a website redesign include:
- Outdated design
- Hard to look at or read
- It doesn’t match current brand materials
Metrics
A failure to achieve your intended metrics is another reason to redesign your site. Updating your website could help solve:
- Low ROI
- Low conversion rates
- Insufficient lead generation
- High bounce rate
- Low ranking SEO
New Standards
Design standards continue to change, especially as new technologies rise and fall. You should consider a redesign if your site is:
- Not mobile responsive
- Unappealing in site previews & social media shares
- Too slow to load
Brand Alignment
Finally, you should update your website to keep up with changes to your brand. Some changes may be easy to implement, while others require a more extensive redesign. Plan to revise your site if:
- Your brand has recently shifted its focus
- You offer different products/services
- Your target audience has changed, or you’ve added a new audience
Even if your website doesn’t need drastic changes, there’s a good reason you should consider regular updates and minor redesigns.
“It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave.”
How to Develop a Website Strategy
A website isn’t visual marketing collateral. It’s a revenue-generation tool, and there needs to be a strategy behind it
You’re ready to work on web design and understand growth-driven design’s value. Now it’s time for a crucial step: strategy.
A website strategy should always come before any design changes. For every proposed change, you should be able to field the question “why?” with an answer that goes back to strategy. Developing a strategy can sound intimidating and time-consuming, but in the end, a strategy is only a plan to meet your goals.
Set Goals
When establishing a website strategy, start with your goals. What do you hope to achieve with this website? Common website goals include:
- Build brand awareness
- Establish industry authority
- Educate or inform consumers
- Generate leads
Based on your goals, you may develop a website with valuable content for users to consume for free. Or you may place greater emphasis on your products and services, filling your site with targeted CTAs and landing pages.
Know Your Audience
Before you begin marketing, producing content, or even structuring your website, learn about your audience. Develop buyer personas that cover demographics, interests, and pain points. Today businesses have learned that putting your audience first leads to the best results.
User-Centered Design
A modern trend in web design has shifted focus to the user and their needs. While user-centered design concepts may seem obvious, many companies have only been concerned with presenting the information they deem most important.
The user-centered design focuses on site visitors and how they experience the site. While optimizing your website for users can require research and testing, the result is a clean, accessible design with easy navigation. Above all, users need to be able to access the information they’re seeking as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Why Website User Experience is Key
User experience, or UX, is one of the most critical considerations in web development. UX leads to more significant web traffic, higher conversion rates, and brand loyalty. But poor UX may have even longer-lasting effects.
According to an Akamai study, users who have had a negative experience at a shop are 79 percent less likely to buy from the same site. User experience also applies to site performance. Forty-seven percent of internet users expect a web page to load within two seconds or less, and 40 percent are unwilling to wait more than three seconds.
Keep Your Site Responsive
Users aren’t just accessing your site on a desktop anymore. Mobile internet browsing already surpassed desktop browsing rates by 51.2 percent in 2016. Any web redesign must consider mobile and tablet users.
A mobile-responsive website ensures that your site content remains accessible, regardless of format and sizing. Websites displayed on mobile devices have significantly less screen space. Working with a designer, you can ensure your content automatically “responds” or scales up or down according to the device and screen size.
Set Up a Selling Structure
After goal-setting and audience research, the next step in your web design strategy is how you choose to sell. Whether or not you run an e-commerce site, your website sells something. That may range from your brand name to your expertise and trustworthiness. All websites need a clear conversion path directing visitors to your site’s purpose.
What’s Your Website Conversion Path?
A website conversion path turns new visitors into leads and leads into customers. You need to have a variety of content on your website for each stage of the buyer’s journey, so users can move from one stage to another without being asked for too much, too soon.
A typical conversion path begins with free, helpful content such as blog posts. These posts attract new visitors who may stay to consume multiple pieces of content at once or come back at a later date.
The next step is gated content in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. These are typically e-books or extended guides packed with value for your audience. You can direct visitors to this content with CTAs in your regular blog posts and landing pages explaining the value of your offer.
Once a visitor shares their contact information, you can direct market and specific offers based on interests and browsing behavior.
Tailoring Your Web Design for E-commerce
If you’re designing an e-commerce site, there are a few extra considerations to consider to make your website great. Security is one of the most notable differences. While security on any business website is essential, the stakes are higher for e-commerce. If you’re asking customers to share their payment information on your site, you need to take measures to secure their trust. Start with an SSL certificate and display the accompanying security seal on your site.
Site speed and load times are equally important. A website that loads too slowly, especially during payment stages, decreases trust and increases the risk of shopping cart abandonment.
E-commerce sites also need to have easy, understandable payment processes. Ideally, you should offer more than one trusted option, such as card payment processing through Stripe and PayPal as an alternative.
Finally, e-commerce sites should place more emphasis on product presentation. Showcase your top products or services with high-resolution images and intelligent, intuitive design. Avoid overcrowding your site with too much information.
Instead, be selective and highlight a few best-selling or newest items. Then use menus, internal links, and CTAs to direct customers to pages appropriate for their stage of the buyer’s journey.
Site speed and load times are equally important. A website that loads too slowly, especially during payment stages, decreases trust and increases the risk of shopping cart abandonment.
E-commerce sites also need to have easy, understandable payment processes. Ideally, you should offer more than one trusted option, such as card payment processing through Stripe and PayPal as an alternative.
Finally, e-commerce sites should place more emphasis on product presentation. Showcase your top products or services with high-resolution images and smart, intuitive design. Avoid overcrowding your site with too much information.
Instead, be selective and highlight a few best-selling or newest items. Then use menus, internal links, and CTAs to direct customers to pages appropriate for their stage of the buyer’s journey.
Best Practices for Planning Your Website Design
Website projects can quickly go over budget and behind schedule, if there is no proper planning or project management methodology in place
After developing a website strategy, it’s time for a plan to execute your project. Consider project management, website builders, content, and content management.
Project Management Options
Two project management methodologies are most common for building a website: waterfall and agile. Neither method is objectively better, but each serves different purposes and business types.
Waterfall Methodology
Waterfall is the most common method for minor, fixed-cost projects, where the scope is clearly defined. The process is linear and highly structured, with clear stages completed in order. Each stage should be completed and approved before starting the next step.
The benefit of the waterfall method is predictability and timeliness. With a clear project plan, it’s easy to meet strict deadlines and stay within a limited budget. However, this structure also makes it challenging to adapt to changes or complications that may arise during the project. The waterfall method also places testing at the end of the process, so it may be challenging to gauge the project’s effectiveness until it is completed.
Agile Methodology
Agile management is an approach that emphasizes adaptability. These projects move quickly and focus on smaller tasks necessary for the project’s completion. Teams complete requirements as they arise without following a set project plan.
Agile project management allows for consistent re-evaluation to ensure that projects meet their goals and address any unexpected changes. The risks of the agile method are a lack of structure, overly lax timeline, and scope creep, making it easy to over budget. Agile also requires a more hands-on approach with frequent feedback.
Both methods work and have been used successfully. Choose a method best suits your preferred working style and any timeline and budget constraints.
Planning for Effective Content
Content is King. Having great content on your website can dramatically improve conversion rates, as well as search engine rankings
Content marketing is popular because it works. But many marketers put too much time into producing content and see little return. Instead of focusing on quantity, take time to develop high-quality website content. Make sure it:
- Provides value. Above all, content should offer value to users. Most content either informs, educates, or entertains consumers. Consider covering topics your audience would find helpful, even if the idea doesn’t directly promote your business.
- Stays relevant to your audience. Even if you’ve crafted the most comprehensive blog series on vintage cameras, you won’t get far without interest from your audience. Ensure that your topics are relevant to their interests, not your own.
If you’re entirely revamping your website or starting a new one, plan to release a few foundational pieces of content when your website goes live instead of waiting until after your launch. A small library of content on your site will give you a head start with SEO.
Managing Your Website: Choosing the perfect CMS
Being able to adapt content quickly and cost-effectively will encourage you to keep your website fresh
Content management systems help you upload and organize content for your website, including web pages, blog posts, and media. Two popular options are WordPress and Hubspot COS.
WordPress is a well-established CMS that powers 28 percent of sites on the Internet today. With a nearly endless library of plugins, you can customize a WordPress site in nearly any way you like. The cost of running a site on WordPress ranges from free to any level you need. Most powerful plugins offer premium plans to help you with SEO, email newsletters, and analytics.
“Open source WordPress is the most popular online publishing platform, currently powering more than 28% of the web.”
Instead of calling it a CMS, HubSpot called its system a COS, which stands for Content Optimization System. It lets you manage your content and use various inbound marketing and analytics tools. HubSpot’s resources come in a bundle, which may be helpful for beginners but unnecessary for experienced users. The cost of HubSpot COS is also significantly higher, but customized support is always available.
The Benefits of Growth-Driven Design
A Web Design approach that’s all about continuous improvement
Today many web designers approach web design and development from a growth mindset. Rather than viewing a redesign as a single large-scale project, growth-driven design treats websites as ongoing projects.
The speed of technological advancements often renders websites incomplete or out-of-date, even if they were recently redesigned. The idea of a “finished” website is no longer realistic. As soon as you publish your site, it starts to decline. Compare it to purchasing a new car. A vehicle may be new on the lot, but its value begins to decline as soon as your tires hit the road.
Instead of in-depth, time-consuming website redesigns, modern developers recommend more minor updates every year. Frequent design edits shorten the launch period for your website and require fewer resources. You’ll also see benefits in SEO, as search engine algorithms value frequently updated websites over static ones.