Website Redesign: Doing It The Right Way

With the new age of digital media, websites are being accessed more and more by cell phones and personal devices that may not render older websites correctly. Surprisingly, the internet world has been slow to respond to these changes in technology. In this article we are going to talk about website redesign and the steps to do it correctly.

Today, its not uncommon to come across a website that doesn’t work on your mobile device or tablet.. which is very surprising.

There is now a shift of companies looking for website redesign of their site that was originally created years ago so that it can work on all devices as well as having the most up-to-date search engine optimization techniques.

In this guide, we are going to go through the process of re-designing your business website to improve customer engagement, leads and sales.

Finding the Right Website Redesign

These days you have a large amount of web design companies to choose from if you are thinking about a website redesign. When you are looking for the best web design agency to redesign your site, you want to make sure that they create responsive websites with a lot of value and provide an all-in-one solution.

This makes it easier to manage your website, hosting and any other services you may need… all in one place.

Do your research on the company looking for good reviews, awards and any other info that makes them a legitimate company.

Website Redesign Pricing

When you first think about a website redesign, you should look at your budget. Figuring out exactly how much you have to spend on a website can help you see what type of website you can afford.

The great thing about re-designing your website is that there are a few costs that can be eliminated just by already having a website. Usually, you will not have to pay for website copy and images if your current website already has these. This will cut down on costs a little bit.

Here are a few things that can have an effect on pricing:

• Design
• Content
• Functionality

The intricacies of the design can have a large impact on the overall price of the website. If you are wanting a website created that has a ton of design elements like video, custom photos, modals, etc, its going to cost more than just a normal site with stock photos and less design elements.

“Content is King” is a saying among webmasters that means content is the most important part of having a website (these days). We are in a informational age and bringing in users with content is still the best way to gain visitors and customers to your website. For this reason, content can be expensive and can affect the price of your new website. This can be actually website copy or articles posted on your website.

Functionality of your website can have the biggest impact on the price. Adding any custom functionality can increase your price thousands of dollars. For example, if you need a custom tool or section built out for your website, it’s gonna cost you extra.

Define Your Goals

So your budget is all ready and now its time to start thinking about your actual goals for the website. This step is very important to define for both your business and the web designer.

A web designer must know the goals of the business and the website in order to create a valuable product that accomplishes your goals.

Don’t know what your goals are? Here is a list of some more popular goals:

• Buy a product on your website
• Fill out a form on your website
• Click an ad on your website
• Read an article on your website

Depending on what your business does, your goal could almost be anything. Most business websites goal is to bring in more visitors and turn them into customers. Simply write out all of the things you want your website to accomplish as this will help the designer create a better user experience for your users.

Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis of similar businesses can have a positive impact on your website redesign. It allows you to see a multitude of things like:

• What keywords they are ranking for?
• How much traffic they get?
• How many backlinks they have?
• What are their most popular pages?
• Does their website work on mobile?

All these are questions you should know about your top competitors. There are plenty of great tools you can use to analytics your competitors.

So how do you even find your competitors? A good place to start is SimiliarWeb. Just put in your current website, choose similar sites, and it will show you some comparable websites to yours based off content and a few other factors.

Aherfs is a great resource for finding your competitors popular keywords, content and traffic. It allows you to compare mulitple competitor websites and even find backlink opportunities.

Wireframe Layout

Now is where the real fun starts! Its time to start mocking up the redesigned website. A lot of the best designers simply use a pencil and paper to layout the first redesign of the website. You could also use a free wireframe tool like Mockingbird or LovelyCharts to create a simply layout and flow of your website.

A wireframe is meant to be a visual guide of the framework of your website using non-graphical layouts. You should create a wireframe for every page you want on your website. We will then order these pages to create a user flow that improves engagement and your defined goals.

Mocking Everything Up

When your wireframes are all complete and laid out in a good user flow, it’s time to create a design for your website redesign. This mean choosing a good color pallete, creating a logo (if you don’t already have one) and adding design elements to your wireframes.

Coming up with a color scheme on your own can be quite difficult. Paletton has a great free tool that allows you to choose a color and it will create a few recommended color pallets for you. Alternatively you can browse Colour Lovers to find some popular color schemes.

Website Build

The last step of your website redesign is to get it built. You can create your website from scratch or get a professional website design company to build it for you.

You must also choose if you are going to built your redesigned website from scratch or are you going to use a content management system?

At Tyton Media, we use WordPress CMS for easy customization and scale-ability. This makes a website redesign much more simple and streamlined.

Post Website Redesign

Once your website is redesigned and  launched, you must still pay some attention to it, or your redesign will be for nothing.

Choosing where you want to host your website can have a strong impact on its SEO and web presence. Google likes websites that load fast so its worth paying a little extra to have a really good and fast server.

Adding fresh content to your website and building quality backlinks will ensure that you move up in Google and keep your customers coming in.

If you have a business with a physical location, you should be doing some local SEO so that you can rank for your service in your geo-location.