Redesigning a website

Redesigning Your Website

Have you ever been in a situation where you just get attracted by a showcase of a store regardless of your needs? Sometimes an appealing showcase distracts you from what you actually want and attracts you to what they sell.

What is redesigning a website?

What is the secret of the method which has been used to make you enter somewhere you didn’t plan to?

Owner of this store managed to sync the colors and objects of the showcase in a professional way to trigger your curiosity. You can use the same  method in your business.

In online markets, the appearance of your website is like the store showcase and your website contents are similar to the objects in the store.

In reality, when a user visits your website, it is your website appearance that impresses the user and encourages him to surf into your website.

At the next level, contents, categorization, menu and other parts of the website becomes crucial for keeping the user in the website. These elements along with reading an informative and relevant article, buying a quality product or getting good service can fully satisfy your customer. 

Many of Websima DMCC customers used to have a website for their online business before. However, over time, they found out they couldn’t push their visitors into becoming customers through their websites. By understanding the customers’ needs, they decided to build a new website with us based on their experiences. You can find some examples of these websites in “Our Work” section.

Sometimes your website (Your Store) has many visitors with very low sales volume! In this case the issues lay behind your website and it needs to be redesigned.

First step; why do I need to redesign my website?

Steve Jobs used to challenge his employees by asking “WHY” questions! From accountants and engineers to the coders should have had an answer to this question: “Why are you doing that?”. But, the answer of “because others are doing that” was the worst response!

This vision was actually the advantage of “Apple” to its competitors. This method made Apple’s employees creative and imaginative in their ideas!

You can also have an appropriate answer to the question of: “Why do I need to redesign my website?” by answering those “WHY” questions and increasing your chance of success`. By using this method, the number of errors and mistakes will be decreased and you can create a better and more useful website.

Let us tell you an important secret behind your decision: redesigning a website is not an easy job. From the moment you decide to do that, you should consider SEO, brand identity and customers’ needs.

So, we found out that logical reasons are required to start the project of redesigning a website. But what reasons would force us to do that?

1.Your website is not capable of conveying your brand story to your visitors

Can your website convey your brand story, purposes and value to the users?

If your answer to this question is negative, it means that your website is weak in terms of conveying the “Brand Voice” to your customers. Brand voice is one of the most effective factors for a successful website.

2.Your visitors get lost on your website!

When you are designing a website, you should see the website from users’ point of view. By doing so, you will have a clearer mind of the changes you should be making.

Accessibility to all sections of the website, page categorization, simplification and clarifications are important factors for a decent “User Experience”. Let us explain the “simple accessibility to all sections of the website” with an example:

Imagine a user is in the page of a mobile phone product. Now he decides to go to the phone accessories products page. How many ways does he have to do that?

  • The first way is to go back to the previous page and choose accessories instead of mobile phones this time.
  • The second way is to directly choose the “accessories” from the drop-down menu
  • The third way is to search for accessories and reach the page

In this case, if we want to give the user a simple access to “accessories”, the second and third options are obviously better.

  1. Your website is not updated and standard anymore

Nowadays, website building technologies are improving fast. Even something that is acceptable today, may not be pleasing anymore after two years. This comes from the fact that people’s taste changes over time.

Page templates and photos’ loading speed and style, become optimized with new methods and technologies from time to time. If your website was designed based on old platforms, you should apply new methods to keep it up-to-date.

As an example, web design with the “bootstrap” is widely used by designers. However, this framework had many updates and changes during the years, as the 4th version has different features and design in comparison with the older versions. Nowadays, the efficient lifetime of a website is almost 2 years and after that you need to update or redesign your website.

  1. Your website is not responsive, or it is not loading properly on mobile screens

Have you ever noticed that your pupil becomes bigger in a dark room and smaller in a bright room? In fact, your eyes are reacting to the environment. Your website design should also react to different situations automatically; Just like your eyes! What does that mean?

When smartphones and tablets came into the market, they showed us a new attractive way of internet surfing, but the problem was that the websites were designed for desktop screens, so it was not quite easy to surf through them on mobile screens back then.

That was when responsive design became important. In other words, it is very important that a website can adjust itself on different screens and devices, so users can work with it easily.

Have a look around yourself! Which electronic device do you think people are using the most? Computers, laptops, tablets or phones? Obviously, the correct answer is phones. Therefore, due to the fact that people prefer to get their daily tasks done through their smartphones, if you want your website to have more visitors you must have a responsive design.

To understand the usage of smartphones better, we suggest you read the “What is responsive design” article.

  1. Your website “Conversion Rate” is low

Let us go a little bit backward and ask you a fundamental question: why is a website design important for a business?

There are many answers to this question, but we all agree on the fact that in general, websites are supposed to:
1. Introduce your services or products to the people in need.
2. Find new customers for the business to grow constantly.

You start to create a website considering all the purposes and features we have talked about (like responsive and updated methods). However, once launched and after a considerable amount of time, the conversion rate remains low! What do we mean by conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the number of visitors who complete a desired goal divided by the total number of visitors. Desired goal means that a visitor does what you want on your website when he visits it. This can be different from one website to another. In a website, you may want the customers to register for a newsletter, while in another website you want them to buy a product and so on. We recommend you reading the “Have a better conversion rate in your website” article to find out more.

The four points we discussed earlier, if applied appropriately, can have a significant effect on the conversion rate and improve your website conversion rate.
In addition to the responses and reasons you provide for  “why we need to redesign our website?”, you need to analyze some data in your website as well.

Second step: Investigate the problems of your website

If you remember, we had an example at the beginning of this article to simulate a website to a store. Now assume that after some time, your store sales volume is not at your satisfactory level, so you feel like making some changes such as changing some products or training your staff.

Your website also needs a change, if you are not attracting enough users or your conversion rate is low. But before going for making the changes, you need to analyze your current website by asking yourself some questions as per below:
• Does your website have too many pages?
• Does your website font is proper for users?
• Do your website photos have a good quality?

To analyze your website comprehensively, you need some tools to separate negative and positive aspects of your website. Tools such as “Google Analytics” and “Google Search Console” can provide some useful information about your website.

By using this data, you can recognize the important pages of your website as well as the keywords which don’t have a good ranking in Google. In order to redesign your website, you should have a smart plan for these pages and keywords so you can have a better SEO website in addition to a good “User Experience”.

Third step: You should have a plan to build your new website

After using tools to understand users’ behavior, it is time to plan. At the first step, identify and analyze the problems you used to have. Our suggestion is that you first  resolve the smaller problems which have a huge effect on your website.

For example, your homepage is the first page that users visit. So, any small changes to it can have a significant effect on “User Experience”. There are some other parts which are effective such as:
• Branding: Designing logo, colors and font
• User accessibility: Deleting useless pages, Better menu experience
• Homepage Contents: Contents writings, Photos

Fourth step: Start redesigning your website
After you manage to have a good plan based on what we talked about, it is time to start the project. Remember to break the redesigning project down to smaller sub-projects and go through them one by one based on their priority and sequence.

 If you are willing to handover the project to a web-design company, we suggest you deal with a professional one. Otherwise, you may end up having a worse website and you may even lose your current customers.

In many cases, redesigning a website becomes too difficult, so we decide to build a new website from scratch! In this case, a new website with a different strategy and design will be built on a different domain. Once done, we will gradually redirect old pages to the new ones.

Final Notes

As you have read, redesigning a website is a time taking and important process; but the issues and facts we have mentioned in this article would help you forget about your fears and start to do that right now.

Your website is an important tool for your business. If you cannot have a better website, it means that you cannot satisfy your customers and it guarantees your failure. Now is a good time to redesign your website in a professional way.

Have you ever had an experience of redesigning a website? How complicated was that and how effective do you think that was?

FAQs

why do I need to redesign my website?

1.Your website is not capable of conveying your brand story to your visitors

2.Your visitors get lost on your website!

3. Your website is not updated and standard anymore

4. Your website is not responsive, or it is not loading properly on mobile screens

5. Your website “Conversion Rate” is low

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