Redesigning A Website - Seven Tips to Adhere To

1. Goal: More visitors and leads.

There should be a good reason why you are redesigning a website. It should not be because you are bored with the design or because your boss wants it green and not grey. It should be to impact your business. So focus should be on the results you want which are more visitors, leads and customers. Every redesign decision you make should be focused on improving these points. Its not about how flash the site is but about what will improve your marketing efforts.

2. Do whatever you can to avoid pitfalls

There are many ways to redesigning your website that can actually have negative impact on your results. These redesigns do have, in more ways than none negative impacts on marketing results. An existing website has a lot of assets that have been built up during its lifetime. These assets help you get found by prospects who can then be turned into leads and ultimately customers. One has to find out what these assets are (usually remarkable content, optimized keywords, inbound links, and conversion tools) and protect them during redesigning a website. You have to understand that many web designers are designers and not marketers.

3. Do not spend money on unique design but on remarkable content:

A guy called Seth Godin said something about this: "I am going to go down on one limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than 1 billion pages on the web and there must be one you can start with. Your car is not unique neither is your house". Most people care about content rather than design or redesigning a website. If that is done it should be purely for marketing reasons.

4. An ongoing content building strategy should be of paramount importance

When or if you have more content you will have more visitors and your business will grow faster. A 100 page blog or website will beat a 10 page website in traffic 90% of the time. A 500 page website will even do better. So the aim should be to build a strategy that builds content on a continuous basis.

5. Let there be conversion experiments

Constantly improving the effectiveness of your conversion tools (landing pages) is the key to effectively driving your conversion rate and the number of leads you get from your website over time. A static website and an IT consultant having to edit the pages every time is a no no. It is better to have a WordPress site that can be edited without having to know code.

6. A blog, RSS, SEO and landing pages should be included

All websites these days should have these basics. They work and are not expensive. Blogs are great for creating ongoing content and for customer rapport through comment functionality. RSS tools allow content to be pushed out to other websites and people, thus increasing the reach of your content. Landing pages will get good value out of your traffic. SEO on the other hand is not hard and gets results.

7. Metrics

Leads And Visitors. If the goal is to increase visitors and conversions then the metrics should be thus: If the CEO says redesigning a website for a new look is the goal. Tell him to go take a walk. Show him your new improved lead conversion metrics. A business website is a business tool and nothing else. Leave the works of art to the galleries and museums.