Is your website looking dated? Or does it no longer serve your business effectively? It may be time to redesign your website. Your website is a critical part of your business. It serves many functions. In addition to informing potential customers about your products or services, it also communicates information about your brand, lets people know how to contact you, and provides an easy way to promote new products, events or contests.
Competition in the digital age is fierce, and potential customers often make snap decisions when looking for products or services. If your website looks too dated or if it doesn’t load fast enough, customers who may otherwise love what you have to offer won’t give your website a second glance. Therefore, it is critical that your website is not only aesthetically appealing but also intuitive to use.
The following steps will help you ensure a successful website redesign:
1 – Clearly Define Your Goals
This first step is the most important when you’re working toward a successful website redesign. What do you want to get out of your website? You need to set specific and actionable goals such as increasing site traffic, improving load time or decreasing bounce rates.
2 – Evaluate Your Current Site
Your current website, even if it’s embarrassingly outdated, has served a function for your business and it is important to take note of what’s working. Take stock of your website, including SEO, content, bounce rate and amount of traffic for each page. Doing so will help you understand how your current site is performing and help you develop specific targets for improvement with your new website.
3 – What Do Buyers Want?
Without buyers for your products or services, your business wouldn’t exist. Therefore, you need to be clear about exactly what it is prospective customers are looking for. To complete this step, you’ll need some input from others. First, you can sit down and brainstorm just what it is that you think your customers want. Next, you should talk to people in your company, especially those who have regular contact with customers. Social media can also be helpful. Take a look at what your competitors and their customers are posting about. Finally, you can use all of the information you’ve collected to direct the content and navigability of your new website design.
4 – Know Your Competition
As a business owner, it is important to be aware of your competitors and how they are performing. Visit your competitors’ websites and take note of their site content, including blog posts, videos, eBooks, products, keywords and other information. What types of marketing strategies are they engaging in? How are their search rankings? This information will help you develop a strong strategy for your website redesign.
5 – Develop a Content Strategy
For your website to get noticed by consumers (and search engines), you need to produce fresh content. Blogging is a very effective way to drive traffic to your website and develop a readership of loyal customers. You’ll need to develop a strategy to post informative and engaging material on a regular basis. Once it’s live, you can boost your engagement and web traffic by sharing the post on social media. Limelight’s staff can help you develop a content strategy as well as create the content that you will put on your website, from articles to photographs to videos. Let us know if you need help in this area.
6 – Make it Mobile-Friendly
Because consumers are spending an increasing amount of time on their smartphones, it is important for your website to be optimized for mobile viewing. An effective way to do this is to create a responsive website that will determine what type of device the consumer is using and adjust the layout accordingly. All of the websites Limelight Department develops are mobile responsive. If you’re not sure whether yours is or not, get in touch with us and we can help you figure that out, and if anything needs to be done to improve that functionality.
7 – Track Your Results
The work is not done once your beautiful new website is live. You need to make sure the new design is meeting the goals you established in Step 1. To make sure your website is performing optimally, you need to measure its effectiveness. Track your web traffic and conversions. You may need to make small adjustments to optimize your website performance over time.
Do You Need a New Website?
If you’re ready to upgrade your website, give us a call. We love analyzing data and helping businesses develop attractive new websites that drive traffic. Our marketing experts will help you build a new website that will attract new customers and boost your sales.
