The internet’s boundaries are expanding at an exponential rate as we proceed deeper into the twenty-first century with some researchers estimating the existence of approximately one billion different websites as we enter 2016. With this enormous selection to choose from, you may be shocked to find out that the average person only explores around 96 different domains per month, which is roughly 0.0000096% of the websites available.
If your organization currently operates its own website, you may be asking yourself how you can compete with the plethora of websites clamoring for people’s attention on a daily basis. The key, in almost every case, is by providing a website that functions at an exceptional level for the people who wish to interact with it.
If, at any point in time, you find your website to be functioning at a less than optimal level, you may wish to consider whether your website is due for a redesign. To assess this, don’t only rely upon your employee’s interactions with the website, ask the everyday visitors to your website for feedback, as this feedback will inform your decision to redesign.
While many companies invest multiple hours and thousands of dollars into expansive redesign processes, know that this is not always necessary because many websites already function well with the demographic they are trying to reach…no need to fix what’s not broken, right?
If you are unsure whether a website redesign is warranted for your organization, consider some of the following scenarios. If you agree that your organization is experiencing several of these scenarios, then venture forth with the amazing opportunities that result from website redesign.
Implementing your Rebranding Efforts:
Overtime, nearly every company designs and implements a different approach to its original branding efforts. These updates often impact your company’s logo, mission and vision statements, processes, and more. With these changes, it becomes necessary to update not only your company’s website but also all documents used within your organization. Your rebranding efforts will undoubtedly be noticed by anyone who has interacted with your website previously, so feel free to show them off and let the world know!
Adding Improved Functionality:
If you are seeking to add additional features such as blogs, user forums, e-commerce opportunities, and other improvements to your website, a redesign is most definitely in order. With this increased functionality you can better interact with your customers, allow them opportunities to discuss your product with one another, and even open up opportunities for them to purchase your products online. These simple changes will make a world of difference for your users and your company.
Making it Mobile:
With the advent of numerous mobile devices (ex. smart phones and iPads), many of today’s internet cosmopolitans visit company websites while on the move between their various commitments. Through redesigning your website to function properly on all types of mobile devices, you will ensure that your company reaches a much larger audience. With this larger audience and increased functionality, you will also undoubtedly be able to secure more of the vital funds necessary for your company’s future.
Incorporation of Social Media:
If you have yet to connect your company’s social media accounts to your website, you are risking the success of your business! In your next website redesign, consider linking each of your social media accounts to your webpage so that visitors to your site can easily connect with your company on a more personal level. You should also consider taking this a step further by adding social sharing tools so that people can share, tweet, or pin your product to their personal pages! Once you have created these opportunities for your customers, they will likely take advantage of them by spreading the word…nothing like free advertising right!?
Improving Usability:
When considering website redesign, it is important to note the difference between usability and functionality. When companies talk about improving usability, they mean they want to improve customers’ abilities to easily find the portions of their website they are looking for. Through collecting customer feedback, those individuals in charge of website redesign will be able to change their website in a way that leaves end users willing to come back time and time again.
Updating Data:
With the online world constantly evolving, old technology needs to be replaced at a consistent rate (ex. Flash Media Player). Through this consistent reinvigoration of your website, you will surely find happy customers who can successfully navigate your website and view all items with ease.
Simply to Change things Up:
The desire to “change things up” can happen at any time and is oftentimes an indicator that your organization has been presenting itself in the same manner for multiple years. It is also an excellent indicator that your customers may be feeling the same. If you decide to change things up, consider adding new images, changing colors, or making other relatively simple changes.
Implementing a Content Strategy:
As your business relationships flourish and your company expands, you may find that your organization needs to provide fantastic content to actively engage both your employees and customers. This content should be SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized so people who search for content similar to what you sell can easily find your product within the first few links presented on major search engines like Google. You cannot just provide the quality content, you need to ensure that it is easily accessible on your website. If your content is accessible and of high quality, you are on your way to business success! Don’t forget to post new articles on a consistent basis so individuals who interact with your website are met with new content upon their visits.
Providing a Video about your Product:
There are dozens of reasons why you should be doing video marketing but we’ll let the numbers do the talking! When companies place videos on their websites, they effectively increase the length of a customer’s visit by 4 minutes….that is a huge advantage for any company! Additionally, websites with videos embedded into their pages are fifty-three times more likely to show up in search results. With a higher likelihood of getting noticed online, your company will benefit greatly from your decision to place a video on your website.
Speed up your Website:
It is no longer enough for your company to only improve their website’s responsiveness, they must also seek out opportunities to increase download speed while simultaneously limiting data use. This is necessary because internet providers and smartphone carriers are consistently cutting back on or charging more for the amount of data their customers use. With these limits being placed on your customers, you would be doing a disservice if you made your website visitors download seemingly endless amounts of information, images, and more. The majority of web designers agree that if your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, your website’s visitors will become disinterested and likely leave. In order to assess what exactly is slowing your website down, it is recommended that you look into hiring a web designer to take a quick look. They may be able to determine which portions of your site can afford to be downloaded at a later time, thus improving your speeds exponentially.
Increasing Traffic past your Home Page:
If you have yet to utilize the full strength of Google’s Google Analytic’s software, you may not be analyzing your website’s traffic to its fullest potential. Google Analytics is excellent in this regard due to the fact that it is free to sign up and place on your website. It also takes relatively little training to understand, which makes it a great software for anyone at your company to use. Once you have installed this service, look through your site’s stats to determine how far people are diving into your website prior to leaving to explore other web locations. Additionally, this software allows for monitoring of the amount of time spent on each webpage within your site so that you can further understand where customers are spending their time. With this type of detailed information, you can strategically alter your website’s design so that it retains people at each step of the process.
Once you have completed your website redesign do not forget to perform periodic check-ins to verify that all of your changes have taken place and are functioning the way you hoped. This is important because many organizations often assume the work was done correctly only to find from customer feedback that the website is now performing worse than it had been before. Save yourself that headache by designing a test version of your future page for customers to try prior to implementing it completely. If it works well for them, then it will work well for others!
We hope you enjoyed reading this article and we wish you the best of luck of with your new website!