What is redesigning a website?

What is the method which has been used to force you entering somewhere you didn’t plan to?

Owner of this store managed to sync the colours and objects of the showcase in a professional way to trigger your curiosity. You can apply this example in your business market.

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 affects his feeling and makes him to surf in your website.

In the next level, contents, categorization, menu and other parts of the websites become important. These parts can satisfy your customer in the next step. This satisfaction can be achieved by reading an article, buying a product or something like that.

Many of  the Websima DMCC customers used to have a website before. But they found out in time that they can’t convert they visitors to customers with their websites. They understood the customers’ needs and tried to build a new website with us based on their achievements. You can find some examples of these websites in “Our Work” section.

Sometimes your website (Your Store) has many visitors but you don’t have enough sale! In this case your website needs a redesign.

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 to be creative and imaginative in their ideas!

You can also have a good answer to the question of: why do I need to redesign my website? By answering that “WHY” questions, you can increase your chance to succeed. By this method, your number of errors and mistakes would decrease 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.

To better understand this concept, we show you an example.

……………………………….. company is an active firm for years in “Project Management Software”. This company is a good example to illustrate the effect of redesigning for conveying a better image of the brand to their users.

The image below shows their website before redesigning:

At this moment, customer conversion rate was 3.5%. As you can see in the image, website appearance, logo and colours are NOT reflecting the true brand identity of the company.

But in the next step, everything changed after redesigning the website:

2.Your visitors get lost in your website!

When you are designing a website, you should see the website from users’ point of view. By doing that, you can almost find out what you need to do in your website.

Accessibility to all sections of the website, page categorisation, simplification and clarifications are important factors for a decent “User Experience”. Let us explain the “simple accessibility of 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 phones’ 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 phone 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”, second and third options are obviously better.

3. 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 tastes change in time.

Page templates and photos’ loading get optimisation with different methods and technologies from time to time. If your website is based on old platforms, you should apply new methods to that.

As an example, web design with the “bootstrap” is commonly used by designers. But even this framework had many changes during the years and its 4th version has a different features and design from the older versions. Today, efficient lifetime of a website is around 2 years and after that you need to update or redesign your website.

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

Have you ever noticed that your pupil becomes bigger in a dark room and smaller in a white room? In fact, your eyes are reacting to the environment. Your website design should also react like your eyes automatically in different situations. What is the meaning of that?

When smartphones and tablets came to the market, they showed us a new attractive way of internet surfing. But the problem was that the websites were designed for desktop screens, therefore, it wasn’t easy to work with them on that time on smartphones.

At this point, the responsive deign became important. In the other word, it is important that a website can adapt itself to the different screen and devices so users can work with it easily.

Look around yourself, which devices do you think people are using mostly? Computers, laptops, tablets or phones? If your answer is phones, then you are right. So, if you want your website to have more visitors you must have a responsive design.

To better understand the usage of the smartphones, we suggest you read “new marketing, new war for brands” article.

5. Your website “Conversion Rate” is low

Let us go a little bit backward and ask you a fundamental question: what is the importance of a website design for a business?

There are many answers for this question, but we all agree that in general, websites are supposed to do:
1. Introduce your services or products to the people
2. Find new customers for a better profit

You start to create a website considering all the purposes and features we have talked about (like responsive and updated methods). But your conversion rate is low! What do we mean by conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the number of visitors who complete a desired goal divided by total number of visitors. Desired goal means that a visitor does what you want in your website when he visits it. This can be different from a website to another. In a website you may want them to register for newsletter, in another website you want them to buy a product and so on…

If your website doesn’t have a good conversion rate, you can use this opportunity and enhance it by applying 4 features that we have discussed before.
If you could have answered “why we need redesigning for our website?” with the reasons we have talked about, in the next step you need to analyse some data in your website.

Second step: Investigate the problems of your website

If you remember, we had an example at the beginning of this article and simulate a website to a store. Now imagine that after some time, your store is not selling adequately. You need to change something, like changing some products or training your staffs.

Your website also needs a change if you are not attracting enough users or your conversion rate is low. But before changing it, you need to analyse your current website. For example, you can ask yourself these questions:
• Does your website have too many pages?
• Does your website font is proper for users?
• Do your website photos have a good quality?

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

By using these data, you can recognize important pages of your website and the keywords which don’t have a good ranking in Google. In redesigning a website, you should have a worthy 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’ behaviour, it is time to plan. In the first step check the problems you used to have. Our suggestion is to solve the smaller problems which have huge effect on your website at the beginning.

For example, your homepage is the first page that user visits. 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, Colours and font
• User accessibility: Deleting useless pages, Better menu experience
• Homepage Contents: Contents writings, Photos

Fourth step: Start redesigning of your website
After you could have managed to have a good plan based on what we talked about, it is time to start the project. Remember to divide the redesigning project to smaller steps and go through them one by one based on their priority.

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 of a website becomes too difficult so we decide to build a new website from zero! In this case, a new website with a different strategy and design will be built on a different domain. After finishing that, gradually we will 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 to 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 it 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?