How to Get Ready for a Website Redesign
There are a lot of reasons why a redesign may be needed - sites become obsolete, company branding is changing, sales are falling, or the quality of leads is decreasing. All these and other problems can be solved with the help of a redesign by a UX/UI design company.
4 Steps to Prepare for a Website Redesign
Taking these actions will save you from many worries that often arise at the redesign stage.
First Step: Situation Analysis
After deciding on the need for a redesign, you will most likely want to take action immediately and create a great new site that will appeal to customers and everyone in the company. But that’s not how it works, because before you act you need to understand what needs to be changed and what not to lose.Analyze how users use your site, including which pages they visit most often, which pages they spend a lot of time on, and which they prefer to close immediately. Studying statistics will help you understand what must be included in the new website. Such analyses often bring surprises; for example, it may turn out that pages that no one considered necessary were viral among users and show the best conversion.Such conclusions will be the basis for the next steps.
Second Step: Study Competitors
After you understand your current site and what is bad or good about it, it’s worth taking a look at how the competitors are doing. You should conduct a study of their websites and make a report for each one with their strengths and weaknesses.This step will reveal the design trends that are currently dominating your industry. Are competitors using videos or large images? Do they mention prices for services or try to hide this information? Why are they doing this? Such questions and answers to them will help not only create a beautiful website but also get closer to getting a working business tool. For example, if none of them disclose prices and you show them, users can appreciate such openness.It’s not worth copying competitors blindly; it is essential to look for opportunities to stand out and borrow individual successful solutions.
Third Step: Redesign Your Goals and Testing
A redesign is a large-scale project, which means a variety of people will work on it. A website is a business tool, and as such, it is necessary to evaluate it from a business perspective. This is the only way to understand whether or not the project was successful. Use the results of analytics conducted during the first step. Your new website should be just as good or, preferably, better: with higher conversions, more visitors, more sales.A/B testing is the tool that will help you understand your business goals better and formulate them for the future. Even before developing a new design on the old website, you can change some things and see what changes in user behavior. The absence of such tests can lead to the fact that horrible decisions will be recreated in the new design.
Content Must Be Ready in Advance
Realistically working on a website that uses only template phrases, like Lorem Ipsum, is the wrong approach. What looks good in such a situation will not necessarily look its best when real business content is added. Will the layout be right, will there be enough data for such a long landing, will photographs of different size and quality be needed - only real content can give you answers to these questions.This means that the preparation of content becomes one of the primary tasks in the process of the website redesign. Therefore, after studying the statistics of website use and developing the goals of the restructuring, it’s worth starting out not by writing code but by writing texts and preparing images or videos.
Final Thoughts
The redesign of your website might be much less stressful and more profitable if you get ready in advance. Analyze your current state, study the competitors, prepare the content, and set up new business goals. These actions will turn a disastrous process into a stable foundation for your success.