Website redesign - more than just making things pretty.

About 70% of our work at Reborn Media involves redesigning and rebuilding websites, rather than brand new projects. It always interests me to understand the motivation behind a website redesign. It is one of the first questions I ask when talking to a charity, and quite often I am surprised by the uncertainty of the responses.

A redesign or rebuild is a great opportunity to review and improve the content, user experience, and returns of your website. Getting to the bottom of what is motivating a redesign plays a key role in our planning and design process. If you are purely looking at re-skinning your site, you are probably missing a great opportunity. Here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to help you plan your redesign to ensure you get the best out of this opportunity.

1) How are users interacting with your current site? Where are the gaps?

Understanding how your users discover, use and interact with your site gives us vital information about what needs fixing and changing in the rebuild. Google Analytics is an obvious place to find this information. Analytics is a fantastic tool to help us understand user behaviour on your site, but do not rule out direct customer feedback as well. Understanding user behaviour helps highlight areas in the funnel that are failing. Simplifying processes or improving content might resolve these problems. Until you identify these issues clearly, it is difficult to know exactly what needs attention, which leads us nicely onto our next point.

2) What problems do you want your redesign to fix?

It is useful to compile a prioritised list of key areas you want your new website to address. For example, perhaps your site is not ranking well on search engines for certain terms, or you want to drastically increase newsletter sign-ups. Once we have this list, we also have a baseline to measure the success of your new website a few months down the line.

3) What do you want to change about how you use your website?

A website needs to work effectively for your users and customers, but it also needs to work well for you. It should be easy to edit, control and access. Before beginning a redesign, we recommend planning how you intend to administrate it. Do you have a team who will edit your site, or is it just you? Do your editors require different levels of access? What type of content do you regularly need to update (images, blog posts, videos, etc.)? How often will you administer your site? Which devices do you use to access the back end? These are all important questions to consider. A redesign or rebuild is an ideal chance to streamline and improve your editing workflow and experience.

4) What is working well with your current site?

It is rare for an existing site to be a complete disaster. Often, when we ask this question, we discover that there are elements of a user's existing website that work well and are worth keeping or evolving. When rebuilding a new website, it is tempting to completely start from scratch and abandon everything done previously. However, be careful not to discard valuable elements. Your current site probably does some things very effectively.

5) How does your site fit in with your overall marketing strategy?

A website is just one part of your overall marketing strategy, and it is important to understand how it fits into the bigger picture. Do you have a social media strategy? If so, how does your site integrate with it? What about offline marketing efforts? Does your site have suitable landing pages to direct traffic effectively? How will your new site adapt to seasonal promotions or special offers? Start viewing your site as a key marketing tool, rather than an isolated endpoint or separate entity.

Conclusion

Redesigning and rebuilding a website is a perfect opportunity to review every aspect of your online presence, not just its appearance. Unless you have an unlimited budget, this is a chance that does not come around very often, so it is important to make the most of it and get things right.

Methodical thinking and logical planning are your friends here. Ask challenging questions, seek honest answers, and formulate a clear plan to ensure that the next iteration of your website has the most positive impact it possibly can.