We design websites to perform. What do we mean?
For years companies have redesigned their website. But the need to change the website is normally driven by the need to generate more traffic, increase sales leads, to get found through search engines and to engage customers and prospects - none of which often has anything to do with just design.
The right reasons for a website redesign
- We need to get found more often by more people on search engines
- There is nothing to engage people when they get our website
- We are not converting visitors into leads
- There is nothing on our website to interest people
- We need our new branding - but need to improve our site at the same time
Problem is if you only think about the design look and feel, you miss the opportunity to review how you engage with visitors and improve the customer experience.
For example; what do visitors get? What value do they gain? How can you connect better? How do you want to get found, by whom and how will you stay in contact with them?
Put these items on your To Do list
- Create more, better, optimised content
- Create more, better offers and calls to action
- Optimise landing pages
- Map out your taxonomy (information and content)
- Review the company’s total knowledge base (things you know across the company) and work out what you can give out
- Work out how the customer journey works
- Understand why people come to your site, so you can understand how you can help them and engage them
- Understand how you can optimise content to drive traffic
- Understand how to use multimedia and interactive media
- Think about how you engage people in social media through the site
- Think about the different content types you have or can create and then how you’ll present to them or offer them: eBooks, Presentations, White Papers, Video, features comparisons, case studies, testimonials, product reviews, photos
- Map out the marketing personas
- Understand all the content design templates you’ll need and how you’ll use them
- Map out all SEO specific titles, urls, H1-2 tags, alt tags, relative canonical, anchor text, external links and internal links, content, resources, calls to action
- Create the rules, policies and management on which you’ll manage, maintain and update these sites
- Does the site meet your brand promise?
- What other channels do you need to use – mobile, apps, tablets, desktop, podcasts
- Work out what you’re doing right based on your analytics – from keywords, to inlinks, to popular pages
- Do you have enough content and what needs to be generated
- Does your goal review highlight new functionality that you need or give you a hole in your content
- Managing the migration process, preparing your URL mapping