10 Things You Should Know Before Embarking On a New Website Design

10 Things You Should Know Before Embarking On a New Website Design

Many reasons exist for updating your website, such as improving the user experience, enhancing functionality and making your site more search-engine friendly. In hindsight, you might have a few regrets about how you set up your original website (and so you’re hesitant to jump into a huge website design process).

Here’s a handy guide to follow before you embark on a new website design that will help you avoid some of those regrets:

Determine Goals:

As with any project, you’ll need some solid goals for your new website design. Do you want to improve SEO or increase conversions? Do you want to direct traffic to a certain section of your site?

Benchmark:

If you haven’t already, set up some benchmarks for metrics to compare before and after launching your new website. This way you can measure the success of your traffic.

Measure:

Use analytics to determine what pages or topics perform the best, so that you can focus your re-design around those. Measure the flow of your website traffic to determine how your sitemap could be improved.

Survey:

Ask your current customers or members for their feedback on your website to see what features they like, or what may need to be added. This is a great resource for predicting what will improve the user experience.

Compare:

Review your competitors’ websites to see what’s working for them. You may find ideas for items that you’ll want to incorporate in your website re-design to stay competitive.

Create a Content Strategy:

Based on what content performs the best, build a robust content strategy. Be sure to keep your content strategy in mind while planning the website redesign, so that your site can support that strategy.

Make a Comprehensive Plan:

With the help of your marketing or website design agency (based on your own experience, data, and customer feedback) create a full plan for the new website. Try to anticipate all changes that need to be made, and map out the new sitemap.

Keep High-Performance Content:

Figure out which URLs perform the best, and then make a plan for re-directing those URLs to your new website to keep your SEO intact. This must be handled carefully, because changing URLs or improperly re-directing them might cause you to lose your SEO history and lower your page rankings.

Backup:

Before making any major changes, backup all your website content. This way you can reference your content for any reason after your new site is launched.

Review:

Make a plan for constant review or your website performance, and keep in mind you’ll likely need to refresh or make updates to your site in the future.

At SKYFALL BLUE, we know that creating a new website design can be an overwhelming process. This guide should help you anticipate some of your website needs, but we’re always available for consultation if you need additional help in launching your new site.