Have you been told your site is outdated? Maybe you think your site is beautiful but ineffective? I guess it is time to do a website redesign and change something so that things can improve.
Why should you do a website redesign?
Whether you have a wordpress site, or a small static site with a few pages restyling activity should be done at least every 5 years, because trends and functions change, and visitors must have an interest in visiting our pages. A poorly maintained or very old website does not express confidence at all, and this obviously affects your business.
Today the web is constantly evolving, and like a technological product that comes out on the market today, it becomes obsolete within a year. Unfortunately, there is no way to stop this growth!
9 key points not to be overlooked.
Analyze the competition:
- What more do your competitors have? For example, they might have a site in multiple languages or have a well-structured and followed blog.- Monitor the activities of direct competitors; i.e., those who do exactly the same work as you and indirect competitors; those who fall within your target audience, even if they do not offer the same product or service as you. Ex: If you have a take-out pizza business, your indirect competition might be X sandwich shop or McDonald’s. Why? Because even if they don’t sell pizza, they are still fast food, and it’s easy for your potential customer to satisfy their need to eat fast with a sandwich as well.- Monitor the right competitors: don’t look at the incumbent site that has been competing with you forever. Analyze the site that is best positioned concerning your product and service and take a look at those sites as well and especially; if Google rewards them by placing them in the top positions it will mean there is the right reason.
Analyze your customer by asking yourself these 3 questions:
- What problems do you solve for your client?
- Why does he turn to you and not to your competitors?
- What are his main concerns about your products/services?
After you have given yourself these answers, put this information on your site. Unfortunately, this is something that is very underestimated, but is of utmost importance! Analyzing your site - Specifically, I suggest you check the pages that bring you the most leads and with which pages you sell your products/services the most. Check them thoroughly, make a list of them and take care to try to understand the reasons why they can in your opinion convert more than others, to adjust to the extent possible other pages of the site that convert less and keep the most effective features also on the new site.- Check the page visits and try to understand which pages have the most visits. List these as well and again try to understand the reason for the “success” of these pages- Bounce rate: are there pages that have a very high bounce rate? Try to understand why; maybe they are not useful and need to be deleted or maybe they need to be improved.
Graphics.
If your company has nothing to do with Ferrari, don’t try to have a design similar to their site, just because you liked it. Maybe you don’t even sell cars! Graphics must be relevant to your industry.
Graphics is communication and as such it has to say things in the right way. I can’t make it clear that I have a take-out pizza place if when I talk, it almost sounds like I’m trying to sell you a car. Don’t you find that?
Update the content.
If you think you’re just going to change the graphics and reuse the same old stuff from 10 years ago then you’re dead wrong!
1 Let’s update the texts. Let’s rewrite them better if it is possible. And I am more than sure it is possible!
2 Let’s add new pages, maybe with new services offered, products and some new blog articles.
3 Let’s change the photos but do it right. Bought photos are definitely fine, but if for example you have a staff of 10 people, don’t put the usual standard photo you see everywhere, depicting guys sitting around a table. Put their faces. Don’t worry, if they don’t look great there is always Photoshop! 😂
Take good care of the homepage.
Figuring out what to put on your main page is critical. Never put in random stuff and instead figure out which pages your visitors see the most. That way you could put in call-to-actions that invite you to visit that specific page or you could put in images that capture even more attention to that particular prominent service or product.
If your site is not fulfilling its goals
It can happen that over time a site loses its effectiveness. Do you have an e-commerce site and online sales have decreased instead of increasing?
Did you think that with a website in the medium to long term you would multiply your leads, but did not? Did you realize that your competitors are using the site to offer many services and you are falling behind?
These are just some of the “alarm bells” that suggest to you that something is wrong.Try to think things through and figure out what is really wrong. Perhaps the problem is not you, but it is the world around you that has changed and the industry in which you operate has gradually transformed.
Don’t make sudden changes, however, because there must be a solid marketing strategy at the base.
The site is not an isolated element, instead it is a channel that within in a well thought out communication strategy, allows you to improve your business activities.
If your site is not compatible with other devices
If your site is not compatible with mobile devices, you absolutely must redo it. Today people use smartphones and tablets daily to connect to the Internet, search for information, and make online purchases.
If your site is not optimized for mobile devices first of all you lose position on search engines. Google for example double ranks your website. It analyzes the desktop version separately from the mobile version, and this should already make you realize how important this aspect is.
The second reason is that people now connect more from smartphones than from PCs, and if your site does not display properly you have lost customers at the start.
SEO
On SEO or search engine optimization, there would be a separate talk to make, but you just need to know that a site that is not properly optimized or that was optimized years ago and then abandoned cannot bring you any results for sure.
So; website restyling, yes or no?
As we have seen, the evolution of technology requires interventions in order to keep up with the times and be competitive, so I would say that restyling should always be done.
If you think it’s time to do a restyling of your website, don’t rely on the first guy who comes along, turn to a serious and competent communications agency that can give your website a new look in line with your business goals and strategies.
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