In a flexible and lively business ecosystem in North America, a website serves many purposes – it is your shop, your sales rep working for you around the clock, and even your branding instrument.
Nonetheless, over time, even the best-developed sites can fall out of fashion and penetrate dead ends for different reasons which will make the company’s further expansion impossible relative to competitors.
What can open the opportunities for the business is a partial or complete overhaul of a website; however, there are certain challenges with it.
Having worked as a digital marketing agency for years, we understand how website redesign blunders affect business performance across the board.
These mistakes cut across failing to conduct user-centric research and ethical SEO practices, and valuing one’s beautiful site over a working one – all these factors will misguide your efforts of a redesign, potentially ending in a suboptimal site.
Not to worry! What we offer – is professionalism in website redesign processes that include the best practices while avoiding the most common errors.
Table Of Contents
The User Experience (UX) Puzzle: Putting Your Audience First
Think of finding your way through a shop that has a messy layout, poor signage and where the merchandise is placed in the strangest recesses of the store.
It is annoying, isn’t it? Well, that is how visitors feel when they use a site that has bad UX design.
Redesigning your website without conducting user research can be one of the most critical mistakes you can make. Not being aware of your specific audience, their focus areas, as well as online activities, leads to waste of effort and time on a pointless website.
Before starting work on any redesign, it is best practice to perform user research through surveys, interviews as well as web analytics. And create user personas that embody your target customers’ characteristics, which would later influence your web design choices.
Mobile users need to be considered as well, along with mobile responsiveness. The world has become mobile-first, so your site ought to be flexible to different screen sizes easily. Poorly built sites that are hard to use or look wrong on phones and tablets will simply push away too many people.
Another factor would be the site loading speed. No-one will bear with a slow website in today’s fast world. Make sure to compress images, remove unnecessary code, and utilize caching strategy in order to optimize your site well and achieve fast loading times. Keep in mind, time is money.
And last but not the least, accessibility is overlooked. Make sure your website is accessible and usable by everyone including people who are differently abled. Alt tags, color contrast, and keyboard navigation must be integrated in order to enjoy the benefits of an accessible website.
The SEO Tightrope: Balancing Design and Search Engine Visibility
A website that looks good but is hidden from the visitors is of no value. During website redesign, one of the gravest errors is neglecting SEO.
Ignoring SEO practices while redesigning can lead to loss of search engine rankings and organic visitors, in other words making your site unreachable by customers.
To prevent this sort of scenario, keep the old URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions. If there is a change in URL for some reason, 301 redirects can be applied to avoid misunderstandings by search engines about the new URLs.
Use relevant keywords for new materials and structure of the site and make sure to push the updated sitemap to Google.
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The Aesthetics Trap: Don’t Sacrifice Usability for Beauty
Of course, it is important to be visually appealing, but it should not come at the cost of functionality and user experience.
Otherwise, the website can be beautiful, but it is usable only for a few people, and others become annoyed and leave it.
In any case, do not allow excessive aesthetics to overwhelm the functional aspects of the landing pages that have been designed in a professional manner. Your site should have attention-grabbing visuals, yet allow basic actions such as browsing and using the interface to be straightforward.
Don’t forget: our goal is to create a site that will be pleasant to the eye of your users as well as effective and efficient from the business point of view.
Content Migration Mayhem: Preserve Your Valuable Content
The content of your website is important. When content is migrated poorly, things like broken links and outdated information are common, which hurt your SEO as well as the user experience.
Plan for migration of content in advance. Examine the previous contents and make new ones to be relevant to the audience to make sure there is no duplication of work.
Don’t just copy, you have the chance to enhance the content by making it more appealing and more worthwhile to the audience.
The Goal-Setting Gauntlet: Define Your Destination
Rebranding a website does not have a purpose as the ship can do without a purpose. That can cause confusion and even result in a website that is not useful for the business.
Make sure you establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals (SMART) for your website redesign. Outline how much workload to expect starting with achieving traffic increase, lead or sale generation and developing further these objectives.
The Timeline Tango: Don’t Rush the Process
Redesigning a website is a tedious process. Underestimating the time frame can result in hasty moves, substandard quality work and an end product that is unlikely to meet expectations.
Create a realistic schedule that will include all the stages of the redesign including the planning and design and development and the testing.
Account for unexpected delays while being considerate of any amendments and feedback. It is an expense if it is done with proper planning and implementation.
The Testing Trial: Don’t Skip This Crucial Step
It is a matter of fact that your newly redesigned website should be tested to make sure that it meets its purpose and is also interactive. If there is no testing on various devices, browsers and occasions, there will be terrible bugs and misconfigurations that generate a rather uninspiring first-time experience.
Do not simply rely on one or more experts to test and verify your product level outcomes. Use real users and testers to validate the product and ensure the majority of the users will have an effortless enjoyable experience.
The Post-Launch Puzzle: Monitor, Analyze, and Optimize
This is a very critical segment in the design process that normally goes unappreciated after the redesigning. As one may think after launching the website, it is the finishing mark rather than an opening.
After you launch the site, metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate or the percentage of users that leave the website before clicking any links, and the number of successful conversions should be observed.
Continue with the analytics and optimize the strategies that improve the performance of the online platform for getting maximized ROI from this resource.
The Redesign Remedy: A Strategic Approach
Common website redesign errors can be avoided and rectified by adopting a design approach that is comprehensive in defining the key elements of the website – users, SEO, and maintenance.
Engage in User-Centered Design: Redesign as the quick understanding of who the users are, what they require, how they behave, and how they can be most easily served.
An Iterative Approach: Do not be afraid to iterate through too many design variations to find one that solves the problem; do not be afraid to iterate on them.
Fostering Collaboration: Encourage interaction among designers, developers, content writers, and stakeholders during the redesign phase.
Ensuring Quality: An eye is on the prize; delivering a website requires strict adherence to its functional and performance standards in addition to developing and controlling the design concepts.
Continuous Improvement: View website redesign as an ongoing process of improvement. Continuously monitor website performance, gather user feedback, and make adjustments to optimize the user experience and achieve your business goals.
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Partner with a Digital Marketing Agency: Your Website Redesign Dream Team
For most business owners, the prospect and process of redesigning a website can be rather daunting. This is where hiring a digital marketing agency like Top Notch Dezigns could be rather beneficial.
We are a team of professional UX designers, visual designers, copywriters and SEO experts. Quite simply put, these professionals will prevent you from landing common website redesign blunders and help make your web pages easy on the eye and effective.
Simply put this way – there’s an entire force of specialists behind the scenes ensuring that not only does the website encapsulate the essence of the company, but also helps expand the company itself.
They can continue to offer help as well, carry on maintenance, and more importantly updates to ensure that the website is used as a resource in the digital strategy of the company.
Conclusion: Embrace the Power of Strategic Website Redesign
A company’s greatest asset is its website because it is the most important marketing resource within the organization. Understanding gray areas in website redesign and working closely with an expert agency, a captivating website that converts will be created.
Website design can make or break your online success, so avoid poor design at all costs and rather pay for something that resonates with your business and makes you don’t look like everyone else out there.
Again, your website is a matter of your investment – make your selection for professional web design help patiently and see your online business succeed.
