7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Overhauling Your Website Design
The website of a business is like a virtual sales representative. It introduces everything about your business, promotes your products or services, entices potential customers to buy what you offer and responds to concerns and queries they have about your business.
Just as you’re required to train your sales team year after year, you should gauge the performance of your website over time. You need to perform the necessary updates and changes to make sure that your site continues to convert visitors successfully.
Revamping your website, however, is a complicated process. If you’re going to push through with this project, you’ll need to take note of the redesign mishaps others have made. This way, you can avoid time-consuming and expensive mistakes that can tank your site.
Here are the pitfalls you should avoid when giving your business website a makeover:
1. Failing to Set Clear, Specific and Correct Goals
If you don’t know the answer to the question, “What are you trying to achieve from a website redesign?”, then you’ve got a huge problem on your hands.
Establishing goals is vital to pulling off a successful revamp. You need to know where to begin, what problems to fix and how you want your site to look like after the overhaul. A vague goal like “Make my e-commerce website look like Amazon” won’t do. You need to be specific and clear about what you want. You also need to factor in your brand and the products or services you sell on your site.
When you’re unable to translate your design ideas into the right words, don’t fret. Hire a skilled web designer or developer for help. They’ll ask you guide questions to help you formulate the goals for your website overhaul.
2. Neglecting the SEO Component of Web Design and Development
A beautiful website won’t matter if visitors can’t see it. If you’re operating a digital storefront, you need to apply the right e-commerce SEO solutions for your business. This means following the best practices of SEO while getting your site overhauled.
Work with the right team to make your virtual storefront more SEO-friendly. This involves improving the site load speed, optimizing images and fixing broken URLs, redirects and links.
3. Prioritizing Aesthetics over Functionality
Although a website needs to be attractive and eye-catching, you should not make the mistake of disregarding functionality. A site with poor functionality will frustrate users and compel them to do business somewhere else.
When overhauling your website, you need to make it look better — and work better. The two most important components of a good website are easy navigation and smart layout.
4. Creating a Website for Internal Audiences
Your virtual storefront isn’t intended for your employees. They’re for your customers. Don’t simply let your internal team think about what’s best for your website. Get inside the heads of your target market and understand what they want from your business. Then, formulate a website redesign strategy to satisfy the needs of your audience.
5. Letting a Committee Manage Your Website Project
Some business owners delegate the web design and development project to a committee. This is a bad idea, as the project may stall because of disagreements. When a delay occurs in site revamping, this can result in a budget overrun.
Instead of taking a “design-by-committee” approach, pick two to three decision-makers in your organization. They’re free to listen to staff opinions, but they’re ultimately responsible for making the final decision on your web redesign.
6. Giving Unrealistic Deadlines to Web Designers
Overhauling the design of a website takes time. This transformation won’t happen overnight or in a few hours, even if you hire a dozen web designers and developers to get the work done.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should wait several months for the final output. As a business owner, you need to set realistic deadlines by giving designers a sufficient amount of time to execute a site revamp.
7. Investing Little for a Website Redesign
Another common mistake companies make is that they fail to provide enough money for this project. Everything comes with a price. If you pay a web designer a hundred bucks for a sitewide revamp, you’ll get what you pay for — and chances are that your site won’t look awesome.
You, therefore, should establish a realistic budget for your website makeover. An excellently designed site can help attract a number of users and convert them to achieve a good return on investment (ROI).
A website makeover is a huge undertaking that can have a major impact on your company. Before you kick off an overhaul project, make sure your team does not commit these seven mistakes.
