10 Essential Points to Consider when Redesigning a Website

First of all, if you already have a performing website, why should you need a redesign? Obviously, redesigning your website involved cost and involves branding risk as well. If the look and feel of your website have already become a hallmark of your business, the new design can actually have derogatory consequences on your branding. In spite of these many businesses consider redesigning their website just because they need to fix the shortcomings and boost the site perform better. Keeping all the challenges involved in such a project, let us explain here 10 essential points to consider when redesigning a website.

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Review the site’s architecture and user interface

There were some golden rules and acclaimed principles of web design that most of the experienced web developers adhered to for quite some time. For example, we used to focus our design on making most important elements visible above the fold. But over time, some websites really proved awesome with below the fold content as well. So it is more about users and business objectives and less about any hard and fast rule. This is precisely why before starting with a redesign initiative one needs to review the website architecture and user interface in detail.

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Optimize loading speed and performance

When you decide to redesign your website you principally look for better performance and speed. This is one area you cannot compromise with. From clean coding to image compression to using proper media frameworks to avoiding collisions of plugins, there are many ways to boost the speed and performance. Secondly, it is important to boost the mobile viewing of your website as well. Let us offer here some time-tested tips to boost performance and speed with your redesign.

• First of all, ensure using a good compressing tool for all your images.

• Ensure clean coding without bloated codes and broken HTML.

• You can also consider modern techniques like Lazy Loading to allow loading the page faster as the page is scrolled down.

• Ensure fitting your contents including slider images in the mobile viewport.

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Give a boost to website navigation and visitor journey

Navigation is the most crucial element in any website redesign project. You need to ensure optimum ease of use and simplicity. Without ensuring this your website can only add to the confusion and indecisiveness of your users which will lead them to leave the website. If you do not want to make their experience frustrating make it clear about where they need to look at and what they need to do. When guiding your audience you should be in the driver’s seat.

To achieve this you need a navigation menu either in the form of a top bar or through a sidebar. Now compared to top navigation bar sidebar is less effective on mobile screen as it takes more screen real estate which is a concerning area for mobile friendly design. For better mobile friendly navigation even top bar can be sacrificed with a contextually opening hamburger menu. Position the hamburger menu on the top right corner as most users are used to access the menu from there.

Another important consideration in this respect is the thumb-friendly navigation design. Most people access the web on their handheld device and while doing so they access single-handedly by using their thumb on the screen. Increasing number of mobile users use the thumb to scroll a page and access on-page elements. This is why it is extremely important to provide all the clickable links and menu within the reach of thumb.

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A marriage of contents and design

When conducting redesign many websites simply overlook the importance of contents. The contents that helped your website earn the present ranking should not be underplayed due to a faulty design. The redesign should not make the contents hard to find these contents. The redesign should not have a negative impact on the contents.

Understand a few basic things once again. First of all, search algorithm of Google is basically text focused and so, thin text content with a lot of images will not help your contents to gain any advantage on search rank. While redesigning many websites do the mistake of using more visual elements while downsizing the text.

Remember, good volume of text content allows you to use an array of keywords and help to target search ranks more intensively.

Now let us come to the melting point of design and contents. As the attention span of the mobile audience is steadily decreasing just because of mobile browsing, you no longer can expect your audience to read a dense body of text intently on their device screen. Users mostly scan text content for quick to grab points rather than reading long paragraphs. For home page contents it has already become a trend to fit contents within the design blocks ensuring quick reading and traction.

So, when redesigning consider giving your contents a facelift by structuring them and making them more scannable for ‘at a glance’ reading. Break long body of text into short paragraphs with relevant subhead and further break the points under each paragraph into bullet points. Through some info graphics in between to present statistics and comparative studies relevant to the content.

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Give your Call to Action a boost

Ultimately Call to Action elements are important for a website for the express purpose of lead generation and business conversion. Even if your website receives steady traffic, it does not lead you anywhere until they take actions and show interest in your business offerings. All the clickable links, actionable elements like the contact number, Email ID, click through buttons and other actionable links play an important role to engage your audience and allow them taking quick actions. In a redesigning project, you should ensure fine tuning all these elements. Consider the following tips.

• Offer the contact details of the business above the fold, preferably in the top right-hand corner.

• Provide the social page links of your business above the fold, preferably on the top right-hand corner just below the contact details.

• Enlarge every CTA button to ensure easy finger-tapping action on any screen.

• Maintain some buffering space around every CTA button to ensure more traction and engagement.

• Use appropriate colors for each CTA to boost traction. Don't use neutral colors, instead consider vibrant ones. ‘Orange’ is considered an effective button color for many successful websites.

• Keep the number of clickable links and CTA buttons per page to a minimum.

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Establish the brand’s image

In many cases when redesigning a website the brand image gets lost. A business website when redesigning should take extreme care about establishing a brand image and the brand message pertaining to the business. The new design should always keep in mind that the brand-specific color scheme, typeface, and other positive elements that were long associated with the brand cannot be compromised with a redesign project.

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Avoid design overload

Redesigning a website should not lead to loading a junk of design elements in place of the existing one. A design when fine tuned or made better ideally should be more lightweight and stripped of unnecessary elements. So, instead of creating design overload with too many elements, give every page lot of white or negative space and cut the grandeur of design short.

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A great onboarding experience and a landing page

Another important aspect is to deliver a great onboarding experience. Even if your present website is not particularly bad in terms of ease of use or clean navigation, think how you can further orient the user with the website purpose and guide them towards desired actions. As soon as they land on your website, a visual guidance about features and on-site contents can be helpful. A landing page is another important thing to offer. It should be crisp, short, visually pleasing and optimized with contents that portray your business USP.

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Create some space for user generated content

Finally, your newly designed website should also accommodate some user generated content. This content brings the voice of your customers and users on your website which is truly beneficial from the marketing point of view. You can include some customer testimonials, images using your products or services in real life situations and short video portraying customer reactions on your offerings or a lifestyle video with your brand at the center. Such contents create a breathing space for your customers.

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Test the redesigned website before, during, and after launch

After the new design is ready you should test it along with the older one. By split testing both the design and respective elements throughout the design process, before the launch and in the post-launch period, you can ensure the value gained for your business through the redesign initiative. An extensive testing will ultimately make you confident about the new freshly designed website.

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Take away

Didn't we leave many other redesign considerations from this list? Yes, there are still too many that deserve attention. But we tried to explain here the most important ones that most website redesign projects overlook.

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