Web Design 101: Steer Clear of These Redesign Blunders

Are you about to start a web redesign project? This may be called for when you need a new look or need to restructure your website. However, redesigning your website is different from creating a new website from scratch. An existing website will already have its effect on the company’s SEO efforts. Redesigning blunders can do the company more harm than good.

Here are some website resign mistakes to consider:

• Failing to plan. The sayings, “Fools rush in.” and “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” are there for a reason. As with most things, you can usually have better results when you start by planning. Begin by understanding why you feel a redesign is needed. Then, perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on the website. This highlights problem areas to fix, strengths and opportunities to capitalize on, critical areas you need to act upon and potential issues that you have to prepare for. When you have identified the website’s SWOT, you can then outline your goals and strategies for the website. Would you like to increase customer engagement? How about the level of usability of the website? Or is your goal to increase the sales in the next year?
• Forgetting to do an audit of the current website rankings. Analyze the statistics and analytics of the old website. This includes bounce rate, monthly visitors, percentage growth of visitors, time visitors spend on site, what pages get the most rankings, where the traffic comes from, current conversion rates, click-through rates (especially by the call to action buttons) and search rankings for keywords. This provides a benchmark that you can use to determine whether your redesign efforts are effective or not.
• Keeping the focus on design rather than content. Content is still king, even if you have killer graphics. Thus, do not completely chuck out your content along with your old website. On the flipside, however, you should not also keep the content as is. This is also one reason why you need to do an audit – you can more easily identify which keywords to keep and which to put on the backburner. Focus on key content and create your designs around this content. The change in design, as well as your current goals, will dictate how you craft new copy and tweak existing ones.
• Not being aware of the current trends. For one, websites need to adapt with the quickly evolving trends and know which ones are simply fads and which ones will last longer. For instance, more potential customers use their mobiles to surf the web, but there are still some that use their desktops. Take a look at how changes in demographics, as well as how Google and other search engines treat SEO parameters, can contribute insight to your web design strategy.
• Check your URLs and navigation structure. As you restructure your website, you will end up changing your URLs. This can result in a loss of SEO standing, as it takes time for search engines to index the new additions. Also, when you change your website elements, be aware of how the search engines will look at the changes, whether the dynamic links are still indexed. In addition, when you delete old pages, you need to ensure that you have automatic redirects that will lead visitors to where you want them to go.
• Protecting your work-in-progress. Search engine spiders should not be able to access your webpage that is currently under construction. Protect the sites with passwords and add nofollow, disallow or noindex coding. This prevents search engines from thinking that the final and published webpage content is just a duplicate of the content found in the staging site.
• Failing to test the site before the launch. Before you even launch, go through a checklist of things to check to ensure that there are no bugs and design issues. Of course, you need to make backups of the original sites, as well as the different versions prior to the final launch. That way, if you find orphan pages, coding problems, pages that are slow in loading, poor usability, broken links and problematic CSS/HTML, you can easily restore your work.
• Working with the wrong partner. Work with an experienced partner with a strong team. Remember, your website is an important element in your company. It is in fact, a highly effective marketing asset, especially when you are able to harness it. Look for a web design company that is committed towards helping you grow your business. With a good partner, you can ensure that you are investing in good quality coding and aesthetic design.

About Adaptivity Pro

These are just some of the mistakes one can make. It is best to invest in a Utah web design company that has a wide breadth of experience and expertise. Adaptivity Pro offers a crack team of specialists – Utah SEO analysts, web programmers, designers and copy writers – to help you identify your website redesign needs as well as craft and implement strategy.