Redesigning your website? Read these 5 tips first!

5 Top Tips When Redesigning Your Website Or Building A New One!

Thinking about a website redesign? Don’t even think about starting without reading our 5 (and one bonus) tips to help you!


What’s the point?
Before setting ‘pen to paper’ ask yourself these questions; why do I want to redesign my website? What am I hoping to change? What are the goals for this project? Making a list of your motivations for the redesign is so important for two reasons:

  • It helps you keep focus on why you’re doing it so that every smaller decision during the process can be challenged against your reasons for the rebuild.
  • Goals give you something to measure by when you’ve launched your sparkling new site.

Good, bad and ugly
With your goals and your ‘why’ in mind, have a think about what makes your current site good and what makes it bad; this will enable you to start visualising the end result. You might not like a single thing about your current website, but it’s worth having a think about it before you start from a blank canvas. For example, if your customers love your gallery why change it?


What are your visitors saying?
Look at your website visitor analytics – (the data that tells you how your visitors are engaging with your site). The important things to find out is where your visitors are ‘dropping off’ (that is, what page they are on when they leave your site) and what pages are more successful. For example, if it’s your ‘services’ page that people are exiting your website, you’ll need to focus on making this more engaging to reduce the amount of visitors leaving. If you are working with an online marketing company, they can work closely with you to improve in all these areas.


Must haves
These days, there are a few things your website needs to be successful:

  • Blog – keep your customers up-to-date with your latest company news, information about your services and helpful advice. It also tells the search engines that your site is active which helps with SEO!
  • Meta Data – tell the search engines what your website is about with snippets of code [Meta Data]. Without this, it will be very difficult to get your website found on search engines.
  • Landing pages – your website needs a unique landing page for each service you provide. Make sure this page has a good quality content, your contact details and relevant images.

Don’t 404 me!
When redesigning your website, your page names (and therefore page links) may change. For example, the page previously found at /about-us may now be /about. You need to tell the search engines about your page name change by using what’s called a ‘301 redirect’. If you don’t, the page will be marked as ‘not found’ which can be detrimental to your SEO campaign and annoying for your visitors!


Bonus tip: get a professional in!
Why not get in touch with us to discuss your website redesign? We can make sure your new site is goal-focused, engaging and search engine friendly!