Five Things to Consider When Redesigning Your Website
Want to watch instead of read? Click here to see Mike Spakowski, Partner and Creative Director at Atomicdust, explore the five things you need to know as you build a brand-new website or redesign your old one.
Redesigning your company’s website can be a daunting task. We’ve put together a few key things to consider if you’re hoping to transform your outdated site into a successful digital marketing tool.
It’s not just about design anymore.
In the early days, websites duplicated the same content you’d find in a trifold brochure. Most early web technology was centered around design. Content was an afterthought, and superfluous design elements ran rampant. Flash intros, for example, did little to inform visitors or augment brand messaging.
Today, we’ve moved beyond beveled edge buttons and drop shadows, beyond Flash-based art pieces with difficult navigation, and beyond SEO keyword stacking. We’ve finally arrived at the era of usable content.
Your new website’s primary goal should be to share relevant content that reinforces your brand message and shares your product or service expertise. It should also serve as a tool for generating leads and converting sales. To ensure that content is easy to access, the website should work flawlessly across all operating systems and browsers – also, it should be responsive and usable on mobile and other platforms.
Yes, design is still important aesthetically. But usability and content should be paramount to form.
Choose the right CMS.
Now that you’re providing usable content across blogs, white papers, webinars, videos and social media, how are you going to curate and manage all of it? The backbone of any well-managed site is its content management system (CMS).
A CMS makes your site more flexible. It allows your site to evolve with the needs of visitors by enabling you to continuously edit, update and add new content. Choosing a robust CMS also makes changes easier by separating your content from your site’s visual elements. This separation allows you to easily move existing content to different areas of your site, or feature them on your homepage – all without the need to duplicate what you’ve already written.
In addition, keeping all of your information, images and copy in one database makes it easy to create new versions of your site in the future.
Help them find you. Inspire them to come back for more.
You’ve probably heard of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is important, but it isn’t an overarching technique for success. The key to attracting visitors (and keeping them on your site) is designing and coding a site that appeals to humans (not bots), and including data that follows search engine best practices.
Take note: search engine algorithms are smart and ever-evolving. They know all of the old-school SEO hacks, and they’ll ultimately blacklist sites that employ them. Creating well-written, easy-to-access content is the best way to attract new and returning visitors.
Generate leads with marketing automation.
Most first-time visitors aren’t ready to take action. They need to be nurtured.
By tracking visitors who provide contact information and monitoring the content they look at, you can begin to score, profile, and prioritize leads. A marketing automation program can help you streamline, measure and automate relationships with visitors based on this information – like showing them relevant content that could progress them through the buying stages. As visitors move though these buying stages, the program can flag and prioritize them for your sales staff. It’s a much more efficient way to create conversions.
Create better calls to action.
You’ve provided content related to your visitor’s needs – now it’s time to continue the conversation. Once visitors have looked through your site, you should give them a clear call to action designed to elicit a response: buy this product, watch this video, fill out this form, etc. Once you’ve made a sale or gathered contact information, the user’s data should feed into your marketing automation system.
Learn more.
There are quite a few things to think about when planning your website redesign, and we hope this quick guide helped you start moving in the right direction.
And to help you remember and share these tips, we’ve summarized them all into an infographic. Right click to download, save and share.
