Time to Give Your Website Some Spring Cleaning – 7 Reasons for That Redesign
Take a very close look at your website. Is it delivering the results you are looking for? Are the conversion highs your website experienced in the recent past being replaced by terrible lows? Is your website experiencing a downturn in traffic? If the answer to these questions is a resounding yes, you have an ailing website on your hands. You’ll need to arrest the creeping malaise affecting your site by cleaning it of all the driftwood. Read on...
Image by Shirley Hirst from Pixabay
This driftwood takes the form of outdated technology, user experience bottlenecks, non-alignment with current marketing goals, ineffectiveness of your call to action buttons and generally everything else that is wrong with your site. Once you’ve identified the reasons why your website is not working, you can begin its redesign in earnest.
But the question is - how will redesign help your website rediscover its success? Let’s take a look:
Image Source
This point can be explained best with an example. Say your site was designed two years ago with WordPress 3.4, which at that point of time was the most advanced version of this platform. Today, WordPress 3.4, code name Green is not top of the line anymore, WordPress 3.9 - code name Smith is available for use. In this case, purely from the platform point of view, your website can be considered geriatric. Redesign ensures you are able to build your website using the newest WordPress version and bring a slew of new features and improvements to the site.
Web technology is evolving continuously and quickly and you’ve no choice but to ensure your site doesn’t lose out. In order to compete, you need all the help you can get and a technically sound website does deliver high ROI.
Photo by form PxHere
The only thing constant about trends is that they keep changing. There is no reason why your website design needs to keep up with the latest trends making the rounds because it will be a thankless, time consuming and expensive exercise. But, you cannot deny the importance of your website being in tune with the times. This means it shouldn’t look outdated; it should look contemporary and not a relic of the past. If it isn’t able to subscribe to some of the really popular trends, there is a chance it won’t grab the eyeballs it should.
Take for example the case of skeuomorphic design which was all the rage in the not too distant past. Today, it’s a designing style that is fast losing supporters. Flat web design is beginning to replace skeuomorphism. Flat is associated with convenience, ease of use, quick load times and many other benefits that improve a website’s UX. It is also a very modern trend that is appreciated by visitors and looks like it’s here to stay.
If your website is still stuck in the past, redesign will help it meet the demands of the present.
Image by Anna Dahlhaus from Pixabay
There are times when your website’s brand messaging might need recalibration. Your business might have added to its product or services portfolio or it might have decided to market its product to a wider audience. Your website might not be in sync with the changing goal posts of your business. Redesign helps you refine brand messaging and ensures it is perfectly aligned with the goals of your business. Your website is the only representation of your brand and all that it stands for and it shouldn’t be sending in a confused message to its target audience.
Redesign ensures this doesn’t happen.
Image by Joss Rogers from Pixabay
Online users are extremely fickle minded, impatient and want something new all the time. The fact is they have so many choices on offer when it comes to websites that they can afford to be really very choosy. You, the website owners, cannot afford to take your website visitor’s attention for granted. This is why you need infuse your site with a degree of freshness, periodically.
Agreed, this might not make a great deal of financial sense some times, but you’ve two choices in front of you – 1. Boring your users to death by not changing your website design since the time your website was launched 2. Giving them something fresh to look at off and on and trying to up the ante on the digital interactions happening on your site with every redesign.
No prizes for guessing that it is option 2 that should be your pick.
Image by Simon from Pixabay
Think websites and you got to think of Google, whether you like it or not. If your website doesn’t pass Google’s muster, it won’t work. This is as straightforward as it gets.
So what does Google want you to do?
Google wants want you to obsess about the richness of your website’s UI and UX in order to rank well on search engines, rather than building links. It wants you to focus on building compelling websites that are built for the user and not search engines. If your website’s design hasn’t considered Google’s view point, redesign will help you out. By ensuring your website has the kind of features and visuals that provide an extremely satisfying user interface and experience, you are also making sure your target users will derive satisfaction from their stay on your site; a fact that will be recognized and appreciated by Google, leading to an improvement in your website’s rankings on SERPs.
Photo by Pixabay
At the end of the day, you are redesigning your websites in order to beat the competition. By drawing up a detailed website redesign strategy, you can make sure your website capitalizes on the weaknesses of your competitor’s website and at the same time gets rid of all the lacunae on your site. This makes your website more competitive and gives more teeth to your branding efforts.
There are just 7 of the many ways how redesigning will benefit your site. There are plenty of other benefits that website redesign brings to the table and all of them taken together help the website rediscover its appeal, engagement quotient and profitability.
(dpe)
Image by Shirley Hirst from Pixabay
This driftwood takes the form of outdated technology, user experience bottlenecks, non-alignment with current marketing goals, ineffectiveness of your call to action buttons and generally everything else that is wrong with your site. Once you’ve identified the reasons why your website is not working, you can begin its redesign in earnest.
But the question is - how will redesign help your website rediscover its success? Let’s take a look:
#1 | Your Site Gets a Boost with a New Platform
Image Source
This point can be explained best with an example. Say your site was designed two years ago with WordPress 3.4, which at that point of time was the most advanced version of this platform. Today, WordPress 3.4, code name Green is not top of the line anymore, WordPress 3.9 - code name Smith is available for use. In this case, purely from the platform point of view, your website can be considered geriatric. Redesign ensures you are able to build your website using the newest WordPress version and bring a slew of new features and improvements to the site.
Web technology is evolving continuously and quickly and you’ve no choice but to ensure your site doesn’t lose out. In order to compete, you need all the help you can get and a technically sound website does deliver high ROI.
#2 | Infuse it with a Trendiness it Lacks
Photo by form PxHere
The only thing constant about trends is that they keep changing. There is no reason why your website design needs to keep up with the latest trends making the rounds because it will be a thankless, time consuming and expensive exercise. But, you cannot deny the importance of your website being in tune with the times. This means it shouldn’t look outdated; it should look contemporary and not a relic of the past. If it isn’t able to subscribe to some of the really popular trends, there is a chance it won’t grab the eyeballs it should.
Take for example the case of skeuomorphic design which was all the rage in the not too distant past. Today, it’s a designing style that is fast losing supporters. Flat web design is beginning to replace skeuomorphism. Flat is associated with convenience, ease of use, quick load times and many other benefits that improve a website’s UX. It is also a very modern trend that is appreciated by visitors and looks like it’s here to stay.
If your website is still stuck in the past, redesign will help it meet the demands of the present.
#3 |More Focus on Your Brand Message
Image by Anna Dahlhaus from Pixabay
There are times when your website’s brand messaging might need recalibration. Your business might have added to its product or services portfolio or it might have decided to market its product to a wider audience. Your website might not be in sync with the changing goal posts of your business. Redesign helps you refine brand messaging and ensures it is perfectly aligned with the goals of your business. Your website is the only representation of your brand and all that it stands for and it shouldn’t be sending in a confused message to its target audience.
Redesign ensures this doesn’t happen.
#4 |A Breath of Fresh Air
Image by Joss Rogers from Pixabay
Online users are extremely fickle minded, impatient and want something new all the time. The fact is they have so many choices on offer when it comes to websites that they can afford to be really very choosy. You, the website owners, cannot afford to take your website visitor’s attention for granted. This is why you need infuse your site with a degree of freshness, periodically.
Agreed, this might not make a great deal of financial sense some times, but you’ve two choices in front of you – 1. Boring your users to death by not changing your website design since the time your website was launched 2. Giving them something fresh to look at off and on and trying to up the ante on the digital interactions happening on your site with every redesign.
No prizes for guessing that it is option 2 that should be your pick.
#5 |The Call of Google
Image by Simon from Pixabay
Think websites and you got to think of Google, whether you like it or not. If your website doesn’t pass Google’s muster, it won’t work. This is as straightforward as it gets.
So what does Google want you to do?
Google wants want you to obsess about the richness of your website’s UI and UX in order to rank well on search engines, rather than building links. It wants you to focus on building compelling websites that are built for the user and not search engines. If your website’s design hasn’t considered Google’s view point, redesign will help you out. By ensuring your website has the kind of features and visuals that provide an extremely satisfying user interface and experience, you are also making sure your target users will derive satisfaction from their stay on your site; a fact that will be recognized and appreciated by Google, leading to an improvement in your website’s rankings on SERPs.
#6 | Redesign to Make it Mobile Friendly
The days of only desktop users accessing your site are long gone. In fact, there is a good chance that a large section of target users are accessing your website from their mobile phones or tablets. If your website doesn’t render effectively on these sites, there is every chance that it is going to lose website traffic and the conversions will come down drastically. This is where redesign comes in to help you out. By conforming to the mobile first concept while designing your site, you are ensuring your site delivers an impressive UX and UX irrespective of the device on which it is opened. This ensures you do not miss out on the ever growing number of users who will be accessing your site from the mobile web.#7 | To Beat The Competition
Photo by Pixabay
At the end of the day, you are redesigning your websites in order to beat the competition. By drawing up a detailed website redesign strategy, you can make sure your website capitalizes on the weaknesses of your competitor’s website and at the same time gets rid of all the lacunae on your site. This makes your website more competitive and gives more teeth to your branding efforts.
There are just 7 of the many ways how redesigning will benefit your site. There are plenty of other benefits that website redesign brings to the table and all of them taken together help the website rediscover its appeal, engagement quotient and profitability.
(dpe)
This is the perfect blog to share with my clients to get them to upgrade their site. I feel like every site now in 2014 should have a mobile friendly site, even better would be responsive. I’ll be to sure to pass these reasons off to them, thanks for sharing!