As the web grows and changes, fads come and go and it’s generally a good idea to give your a bit of a makeover every so often. If you haven’t touched how your website looks in the last 5 years, then it may be a good idea to look into getting a redesign.

Why should you though, surely it’s an unnecesary cost; Yours looks just fine?

But, there are more points at stake than just the design of a website. A site serves as your virtual shop window, and can sometimes be the first point of contact you have with a potential customer.

If your site, looks outdated, does not flow well, isn’t being shown on Google or does to make the best use of its virtual real-estate, then you could be costing yourself potential customers!

But, before you start talking to us about your redesign, first think on these five tips, it shouldn’t take long and will give you a different perspective on how you go forward.

1 – Set measurable aims that must be met.

It’s important to look at the measurables and the aims that can come out of a project. Sure, a new website will look great but it needs to produce some hard stats once it goes live.

Think about what you want your website to do, for example aims like: “This website needs to produce 20% more visitors each month within the first 4 months of going live” – From this you can reverse engineer and make sure you hit that stat as that’s one of your concrete goals.

2 – What’s this all for, what does success look like?

Like the previous point, what does success look like for a website redesign? It’s important to understand what you want to get out of this redesign and the website as a whole. Sure, looking pretty has its benefits but it’s important to reverse engineer this kind of thing to know why you’re making this investment. Success can take many forms; better usability, prettier, improved SEO, better content distribution, etc.

3 – Is there room to expand?

A redesign should only be a beginning, a great website is constantly building and expanding. The fantastic thing about modern day marketing is that we can build some creative things which you can bolt onto your website. This is smart and future thinking marketing which plays an important part on your site, interactive content like calculators or guides, think of tools which will answer your customers pain-points.

4 – Have you a chosen a good CMS?

CMS, a Content Management System can be an amazing back-end framework for a corporate website, especially if you want to utilise the point above. CMS’s like WordPress and Joomla are powerful and give you the opportunity to get stuck in on the back end. A redesign needn’t be a lick of paint of the front end, sometimes it may be the right decision to upgrade your tired CMS and actually migrate to a more user-friendly CMS that you’re able to edit, build pages and post blogs.

We build our sites on the most popular CMA on the web, WordPress. We give you the time and advice as well as the keys to the system, allowing you to take control

5 – Are you beholden to the developer?

This I’ve seen time and time again… Companies hire a web developer for a hefty amount. They may do a fantastic job.. but, they hold the keys. A redesign that makes business sense does not involve you having to pay hefty price tags to get any minor detail changed. This is why the above point is a good one to consider, there’s no harm in hiring a developer but make sure you’re able to make some of the more minor changes yourself – Or you’re going to rack up quite the bill! Unnecessarily I might add.

That’s why we not only offer you complete freedom to change and add things yourself to WordPress. But, offer competitively priced maintenance packages for your site, which we give monthly time slots, alongside hosting, security updates and more, so you don’t need to pay through the roof to change something on the site!

6 – Have you considered good UX?

I keep throwing out these acronyms I know.. UX stands for User Experience and it’s a very sought after skill these days. Good UX is the flow and usability of your website, is it easy for visitor to navigate to the most essential parts of your site?

Some things you need to consider when it comes to good UX could be:

• How long it takes for the user to get to your desired desitnation
• How long the page loads
• Does it work smoothly on multiple devices?
• Is there an aesthetic appeal to the whole site?

User experience can be guessed with a little bit of common sense, or you could hire a consultant to go into real detail on it. But, at-least have a think about how your new redesign will look and act and think about the average user on your website, can they find what you want them to find. The best way is a simple bit of market research, relatives and friends make perfect guinea pigs!