Why Redesign Your Website and How to Prep

For most organizations, redesigning a website is a big deal. It costs money. It takes time. And, it can be a difficult process for first-timers.

It’s better for everyone -- the client, the developers and designers, the decision-makers -- to be prepared going into a redesign.

A redesign involves four steps --

1. Plan
2. Prepare
3. Initiate
4. Iterate

At the beginning of the process, you’re probably asking and double-asking: should I even go through a site redesign?

The biggest question to ask is why. Why go through a website redesign at all?

When done right, a site redesign provides a myriad of benefits, two of which I’ll mention here:

1. Improved user experience (UX) - User experience is the behind-the-scenes work that gives visitors ease, emotion, and effectiveness on a website. A terrible user experience on a website can ruin a business. Conversely, an amazing user experience can generate scads of revenue for your company.

Example: Wildlife Conservation Society, the leading global protector of wildlife and wild places, worked with Viget to redesign several brand sites. Viget delivered a fully responsive site, a content and e-commerce strategy, a beautiful homepage, versatile landing pages, and an easy-to-use backend. From the new redesign, WCS saw a massive bump in revenue per mobile visitor on its Bronx Zoo site.

2. Increased revenue - The more people engage -- stay on -- your site, the more likely they will purchase your product/services. A redesign assesses what works and what does not work and capitalizes on the greatest revenue drivers while severing the parts with no return.

Example: At WCS, the goal was to raise awareness for their cause and increase support. The redesign focused on a heavily visual strategy, showcasing beautiful animals and natural habitats -- a story their customers believe in. For one WCS site, Viget’s data team ran repeated tests on the gorgeous photos, clean design, and intuitive navigation of the redesign. After eight weeks of tweaking, the final results increased the total revenue per visitor markedly.

Other benefits of a redesign:

• Snappier speed - clear the clutter from your old site and supercharge navigation using deep technology platforms with solid performance
• Improved performance - upgrade to a modern content management system, streamline your front-end code, and invest in a solid hosting environment to decrease page load times and increase overall stability
• Targeted, customizable messaging - increase conversions by creating focused landing pages to engage the full range of your customer profiles.
• Deeper data tracking - discover actionable insights about how customers behave on your site through analytics integrations.

If any of the above benefits are something your website could use, it may be time for a redesign.

Thinking about it? Discover plenty of examples from my awesome co-workers Jason Toth (Experience Design Director) and Ally Fouts ( Creative Copywriter) in the free webinar below. 

Don’t wait; get a jump on what you need to know to plan a redesign.