Tackling a Website Redesign

Designing a website for your business can be a daunting task. In many ways, redesigning an established website can be even more challenging. Whether your site is in need of a slight refresh or a comprehensive overhaul, here are a few tips to help you get the most from your redesign.

Seat Clear Goals

First, you’ll want to establish a few key goals to help guide the redesign process. Have you noticed leads slipping compared to past performance? Does the user experience on your current site leave something to be desired? Is the look of your site just plain dated? These are all issues that can be addressed with a redesign. Setting a clear expectation for your new site will help you judge the success of the redesign once it’s complete.

Start with The Homepage

As the branching-off point for your entire website, it should come as no surprise that creating a strong homepage is crucial to any website redesign. Your homepage will serve as the portal to the rest of your content and establish the aesthetic sensibility of your site. If the homepage lacks strong design or is not user friendly, it could spell disaster for the entire redesign. Make sure your homepage gives a clear and immediate snapshot of the products or services you offer, with a priority on call-to-action for the user. A pleasing and cohesive aesthetic is also a must.

Audit Your Existing Content

To know where you want to take your website in the future, you must know where it stands in the present. A website audit is a checkup that can help spotlight aspects of your current site such as content, SEO, design, and usability that could be lacking. Work with a technical writer to study and optimize your site’s existing content, ensuring materials that you plan to carry over to your new site are on-message for your stated goals. Next, examine aspects of your current design such as user experience and SEO performance to isolate the changes you want to make on the new version.

Plan the Sitemap for Optimum Indexability

A sitemap organizes your website’s content to help users navigate your site. More importantly, the sitemap allows search engines to find and display your site among search results. To make your website visible and prominent in searches, optimizing indexability is key. Though this aspect of web design can get a little technical, indexability is all about making your website friendly to the bots that power search engines. A simple step for improving indexability is to eliminate any orphan pages or 404 errors from your site, as such issues tend to trip up the bots. Similarly, avoid publishing duplicate content.

Divide and Conquer

If you take on each aspect of your new website’s content and design one at a time, your redesign could stretch on for months (or longer). Instead, plan to utilize multiple teams of designers, writers, and developers to execute tasks simultaneously, contributing each component of the site according to a pre-determined schedule. If you plan the rollout correctly, the various elements of your site should come together with few holdups.

Where to go From Here

These tips only scratch the surface of the many complex aspects of a successful website redesign. To achieve results, you’ll want to partner with professionals who can help your site stand out on the modern web while balancing strong visual elements, content, and design. Luckily, TriAd has everything you’ll need under one roof to help achieve your goals. Whether you’re looing to overhaul an existing website or build one from scratch, contact us today to bring your vision to light and make a splash in cyberspace.