Websites Aren’t Forever
Unlike diamonds, websites aren’t forever. Websites by their nature evolve over time, constantly adding content and functionality. At some point, it’s necessary to redesign your site because it looks outdated, has outgrown its current functionality and infrastructure, or both. Since redesigning your firm’s website can have significant implications for your business, it’s important to follow a well thought out process. Here are some proven ideas to help you get started.
Pre-design Analysis
Since this is your opportunity to start fresh, it’s important to review what’s happening in the market and gather input from a broad cross section of internal stakeholders and a sampling of your target users. From an internal perspective, go outside of the marketing and technology departments; consider every area that has customer interaction such as operations and customer service. For customer input, use an online research forum if you have one or ask a sampling of your customer base for feedback.
The important factors to analyze in order to develop a set of site redesign requirements include:
- Understand your business objectives and what measures will be used to track the website’s achievement of these goals. Does it function to drive traffic, engage prospects, qualify sales leads, convert customers, provide a sales channel or build brand awareness?
- Identify your audience including target market s, internal users and stakeholders, investors and the general public in terms of needs and psychographics.
- Review competitor’s sites. This means examining near competitors as well as category leaders. Additionally, assess the top websites including Google, Yahoo and MySpace because these sites reach many people and set the standards for online functionality.
- Gather a list of current issues and wish lists. Make sure that you incorporate this thinking into your process.
- Identify existing systems that need to be integrated with the new site to ensure that data flows smoothly from one system to another.
- Assess new functionality that’s available to determine whether it should be integrated such as blogs, podcasts, videos and other forms of Web 2.0 technology. Functionality requirements may extend beyond technology.
Content
Content is at the core of many companies’ website challenges. Issues revolve around the type of content you provide, who creates it, who “owns” it, where it resides, and whether it’s searchable. Given the complexity of these factors, it’s often necessary to have a content management system to minimize many of the technical issues.
Website related content can take many forms. It goes beyond website copy to include product information, price lists, product catalogs and manuals, consumer input/comments, job postings, investor relations, press releases, third party news and feeds, pictures, audio and video. This content must be managed and formatted for the web to ensure that embodies your brand through its copy, voice, format and presentation on your website. This content may also reside outside your website such as on your intranet, downloads or third party sites. This can cause potential problems such as access speed and security.
Given the evolution of content creation, website content may be created by your staff, third party writers (such as journalists, advertising professionals or pr folks), customers or the general public. Therefore it’s important to monitor both internal and external content creation to ensure consistent and branded communications.
It’s important that content be easily found through search and on-site navigation. This translates to content that is optimized through the use of targeted keywords. These words can be particularly important for companies whose product isn’t primarily sold online since they tend to use more complex copy rather than straight forward, search-friendly words. Remember, this must be done without creating duplicate content. Non-text content must be tagged with associated text to ensure that it appears on search engines. On a related note, make sure that popular content helps drive users to other areas of your website through cross merchandising of related articles and top 10 lists.
Customer Engagement
At its core, most businesses want their website to aid some form of customer engagement whether it’s for gathering contact information for future marketing, qualifying leads, making the first sale, providing customer support (both pre and post sale) or collecting customer input. Also, think beyond your customers to consider how your site works for channel partners, investors, journalists and job seekers. To this end, it’s critical to consider what form these interactions should take, how information is exchanged, and how these procedures integrate with other business processes and systems.
Design
Especially for online -only businesses, your brand is intricately interwoven with the look and content of your website. This goes beyond your logo to include your color palette, typefaces, copy, tone, type of pictures and graphics and audio used on the site. It’s important to provide a look and feel that’s in line with your brand. Your online persona should be consistent with, but slightly different from, your offline branding.
Usability and Testing
A site’s usability is key to any successful redesign. The major areas to consider are legibility, navigation, shopping cart efficiency and any other functionality that’s critical to your business. If customers can’t find what they want or purchase it, your site won’t be effective. Before rolling out your newly redesigned site, put it through usability testing to the extent practical. At the end of the day, if visitors can’t read your text because it’s too small, densely written or ornately styled, it’s missed its mark. Remember, users must get your message quickly and 15 seconds scanning the space above the fold may be your only opportunity to hook them. Therefore, it’s important not to stuff too much into that space but rather to convey your message in a short hand that’s easy to grasp.
A website isn’t forever. The internet’s dynamic nature continues to create exciting new opportunities. Therefore you should continually add new content and functionality. That said, at some point, you’ll need to redesign your website. When you rebuild, make the most of the opportunity!
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