Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, the first impression does make a difference. And at times, the difference it makes is huge, especially if your potential customers and clients are at stake. That is what is in line when people visit your website online. Unless they like your website the first time around, it is tough to make them your customer.
As a business owner, you need to ensure that your website is professional, modern, up-to-date, user-friendly, and mobile-friendly.
If your website is not up to the mark, you need to consider a website redesign. After all, with customer experience taking precedence over everything, it is crucial to offer your existing and potential customers the best you can.
From outdated web design to a lack of features and professionalism, there are many reasons why your website may need a redesign. Redesigning your website can surely fetch you great results, but only if you do it the right way. Doing it the wrong way cannot just decrease your traffic flow, but it can also hamper your online success.
If your website needs a redesign, you need to make sure you do it the right way. Let us, therefore, take you through what to start with while redesigning your website, charting out a sitemap, and why to make your website mobile-friendly.
What to start with first?
If you want to get the best results from your website redesign project, you need to know what to start with first.
And, the first thing that you need to do is audit your website. You should start by analysing what works well for your current website and things that you need to do to improve your website. The best way to do it is to perform an SEO audit. An SEO audit analyses your technical aspects, your on-page aspects, and ranking factors. By the end of the audit, you will get to know what you need to change and things that you need to retain.
During the auditing, also make sure to identify your target audiences. You need to know who all to target with your new website design.
If you are designing your website on your own, there are many things to consider. Some of these include:
You need to find out who your existing website users are and how do they engage with your website.
You also need to find out when and at what time of the day they visited your website.
It is also important to know where they are coming from – their physical location and the search engine they used to visit your website.
Also, you need to know why they are visiting your website, and which device they use to visit your site.
But one rule of the thumb you should always stick to is this – don’t lose focus on your main objective. And, your main objective should be to cater to the needs of your present and prospective customers. Your website redesign should never overlook what your current and future customers want.
It is also important to have clear-cut goals and objectives. Your main aim of having a website is to generate new leads.
While redesigning your website, make sure you communicate clearly to your target audience – your services, new offerings, and other vital information. Also, ensure that you add an appropriate call to action wherever needed so that your visitors don’t have any problems. You should also consider adding forms to your main service pages to generate and monitor leads/ enquiries.
Charting out a sitemap
Another vital thing in website redesigning is charting out a sitemap. A sitemap is a file where you put up all the information about your pages, videos, and other files on your website. While crawling, the search engines read this file to get the relevant information for your website. A sitemap allows the search engine to know which pages and files are important on your website. Also, a sitemap provides valuable information about the files.
So, do you need a sitemap?
Yes, you might need a sitemap in case of the following:
You need a sitemap if your website is large.
You need a sitemap if there is a large archive of content pages on your website that are isolated or not linked properly to each other.
You also need a sitemap if your website is new, and there are very few external links.
Also, you need a sitemap if your website has a lot of rich media content like video and images or in case your site is shown in Google News.
You don’t need a complicated sitemap. You can make a sitemap like a flowchart and built-in Google Slides or PowerPoint. Another way of making a flowchart is to create an outline with bulleted points and indentations that specify your pages, sub-pages, and gives out other structural information.
To make a new sitemap, you need to do the following:
Make sure you have your existing website sitemap.
Make a list of your existing key services and products.
To make everything clear, make sure you have a clear link title format. For example, “Help Sheets” would change to “Downloads” to help users navigate resources easily.
You will notice that there are not too many changes in the top-level navigation, but there are significant changes in the sub-navigation.
Make it mobile-friendly
As mentioned earlier, if you are in the online landscape, the most important thing to tackle is customer experience. With most of us accessing the internet on our mobiles, it is crucial to make your site mobile-friendly. Smartphones have outnumbered personal computers in many countries. If you don’t make it mobile-friendly, your site will offer a poor user experience to people who access it on their smartphones. And, it is difficult to rank well on major search engines like Google if you don’t offer an excellent customer experience.
It is difficult to view a mobile-unfriendly site on a mobile device. You need to pinch or zoom your device to read the content of a mobile-unfriendly site. It is an annoying experience to read a mobile-unfriendly site, and the users are likely to leave the site for good. On the other hand, a mobile-friendly site is easy to read and use. It offers a much better user experience.
Regardless of your engagements in the online landscape – blogging, selling, or disseminating information – you need to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. You need to understand that mobile is crucial to your business, and it is vital to take into consideration the user experience of those who access your site from their mobile devices.
The way your content fits the screen on the desktop, the same way your content should also fit the screen of a mobile device.
If your website lacks professionalism, is outdated and drab, and you want a website redesign services company to turn things around for you, you must contact vStacks Software Solutions now. We are a website design agency, and we know what it takes to design a modern, professional, and engaging website.
