Did you know? Your website serves as a business tool.
It’s a sales pitch, a business card, a product/service display, an advertisement, and a listing all rolled into one and each of these functions is critical to your brand’s success both online and offline– therefore your website is important.
Your website design becomes more important than ever because of this. And, you may have begun to reconsider the entire appearance of your website, or you may have been doing so for some time.
If you’re at this point, there are some things you need before re-designing your website, for the best results. These will assist you in creating the best website possible for a strong presence for your website and business.
5 Things You Need Before Re-Designing Your Website
- What is Working?
- Goals for your Website
- Brand Kit
- Your Mission and Vision
- Long-Term Company Goals
What is Working?
Before you can start re-designing your website, you must first decide which aspects and features you want to change and the best way to know what to change is to know what is working and what is not.
What aspects of your design are effective? Analyze your data to see what your visitors value and what they don’t. Everything that isn’t working is disposable; you can and should get rid of it or improve it.
Goals for your Website
A website re-design for your company requires goals! Set goals for how well your website works for SEO and marketing, not just how nice it looks or how flashy it is.
That is not to say that a good overall appearance does not aid marketing efforts; it does. However, if you only consider the appearance and ignore function, you will completely miss the point and engagement you will receive.
A simple website that functions smoothly for the user is far superior to the alternative. A website with a lot of visual features and fancy code will inevitably have problems– think slow loading times, difficult navigation, or perplexing page links.
All of these things will irritate your visitors, which is the last thing you want as they will quickly click off and go to a competitor’s page instead.
Brand Kit
This process of developing a consistent visual identity is known as your branding. It’s not a new idea; businesses have been doing it for decades with logos and slogans.
However, because people now have constant visual access to the internet and social media, it is critical to create a brand identity that people can easily recognize and trust.
That being said, how do businesses maintain brand consistency? Because not everyone on their team is a designer or even naturally creative, small businesses must ensure that every visual image associated with their company can be traced back to them.
People appreciate consistency as it facilitates trust in people, services, and businesses and it has a pleasing appearance. This is why branding is so crucial. It increases client and consumer trust in a business and keeps them visually and aesthetically engaged.
So, if you do not have a strong and consistent brand kit in place create one, or if you choose to outsource someone to re-design your website, like ARA Digital Services, we can help you if you need!
Your Mission and Vision
It is important to know your mission and vision– what does the future of your business look like? Has it changed? This may be why you need to redesign your website to reflect that!
First of all, determine who your target audience is. The more you know about the people who will be visiting your site, or the people you want to visit your site, the better you’ll be at re-designing a website with the right structure, content, and appearance to attract them.
What are the goals of your business? Consider who you will show your goals to and work towards your goals on your website so your audience can connect and relate to you.
This may mean creating content such as blog posts that give them desired information and that leads to them subscribing to your email list, for example.
Where do you see your business in 10 years’ time? How can the re-design of your website and any elements and content displayed on it help you work towards that long-term vision– this may require certain elements and pages being set up on your website to do this.
Long-Term Company Goals
Following on from the previous point, you need to consider your long-term company goals because, at the end of the day, you want to re-design your website so it is effective in the long run to avoid you keep having to design it over and over again.
For example, if you are not creating good copy that is optimized then you aren’t going to see long-term results from your website– as you aren’t going to rank on Google or see ideal clients. Good copy that is well optimized will lead to long-term results such as ranking!
As well as this, if the functionality of your website and UX is poor, then people will quickly click off your website and go elsewhere– Google will recognise this and see your website as poor meaning it won’t push you out onto page 1 of Google.
Re-designing your website requires you to know how to create something that visitors love, can navigate easily and that Google loves too because of this.
Are you ready to re-design your website?
Now you know what things you need before re-designing your website, you will be able to go ahead with a much clearer mindset of what you want out of the design!
If you want someone to help create a new website for your business so you can achieve the best success you can, then I am a website designer and developer who would love to help!
