A well-executed website redesign can have a positive impact on a company’s brand and bottom line. However, undertaking a website redesign is a very involved project and takes up considerable investment and time from you, your team and your digital agency.
As with any marketing investment, you should make sure there is a sound, strategic reason for building a new website for your business.
I have highlighted some questions below which will help you to identify whether you need to consider a complete website overhaul or just minor modifications. If:
- Your website is not aligned with your current business strategy
- You have not refreshed your branding for quite some time now and the site looks old and dated
- It’s not generating enough traffic
- It’s not mobile friendly
- It’s not ranking on search engines even after spending lot of money on SEO
- It uses flash
- Your website is receiving traffic, but not generating enough leads
- You content is not properly structured and is outdated.
- Your website doesn’t have a blog or CMS integrated
- It’s difficult to navigate
- You are embarrassed to give your website URLs to your potential customers
It’s probably time for a new website!
1. Expect a Partnership From Your Digital Agency
As more and more companies are looking to dominate the digital landscape within their industries, the need for partnering with the digital agency for a long term period has become essential.
Unless you consider them as an extension of your own team, it will be difficult to achieve the results you want.
Trust becomes an important factor in this partnership as you enter into unfamiliar territory that’s outside of your expertise, because you’ll need to lean on the expertise of your agency to guide you through the process.
When you are selecting a digital agency for a web design project, here are some important things to consider in your hiring process:
- Does your digital agency understand your business its goals, objectives and the goals of your site?
- Does it understand your competition?
- Do its recommendations match up with your objectives and goals?
- Is the agency showcasing the work that they are proud of?
- Does it display any understanding about your industry? (Although they don’t necessarily need to work in your industry).
- Do you want an agency to simply work on your project until it’s complete, or are you looking for a long-term partnership?
- What level of experience does the agency have successfully launching projects like yours?
2. Your Digital Agency Will Require Commitment From You
Any successful web design project requires an equal amount dedication from both sides.
As the client, you will have to put in more of a time commitment at the start and towards the end of the project. I have briefly highlighted your initial involvement below.
- Identifying the need for website redesign
- Researching its current situation:
- What’s working on your website and what needs to added and/or removed?
- How many visitors are you getting?
- Which pages are the most visited?
- What conversion rate are you achieving?
- Where are your highest volume of visitors coming from?
- Who are your competitors? What they do successfully that you’d like to accommodate in your website?
- Set measurable goals and objectives
- Set the content expectations
- Plan the budget
- Prepare the brief
- Select the digital agency
- Work with them to come up with the strategy
- Commit time to review and provide feedback on the work that’s done by your agency
- Test and approve the concepts and other digital properties put forward by the agency
3. Expect to Make Decisions About Things That You Didn’t Think of
Throughout your web design, you will have to make the decisions required to move the project forward.
Often you will be asked to implement features that that you did not yourself think of at the start of project.
You will also be faced with questions about your business, a well as other considerations such as which website design, look and feel you like the most; what will work best for your business and hard decisions about things you may not personally approve of but your digital agency has a strong opinion about.
Usually, these core business questions require decision makers to make choices about how they want the website to operate and appear.
If your agency has stirred up an internal pain point, don’t be scared or mad – it means they’re asking the right questions. No one wants to spend time, money and effort to just “throw something up there.” Let your agency – who are the experts – see you through the process.
4. Expect to Learn New Things
When you work on a website design project, you’ll get to learn all kinds of new things, such as how websites are built from start to finish as your agency redesigns and launches your new site.
If you agency uses project collaboration tools, you might also learn about that too.
It can be great fun and I believe you should take this opportunity to learn as much as you can!
You may also need to learn new WordPress CMS or Magento CMS. WordPress Web Designers will make it easy for you to operate your website but you may need to learn few things.
On the other hand Magento Web Development is complex and will require advanced level skill sets.
5. Expect to Get What You Pay for
There are many companies who will quote you in the hundreds to do your website and others that will quote you in the tens of thousands.
I would warn against those who say they can do your website for just few hundred dollars as this tends to mean thy’ll simply use ready-made templates and change your logo without customising their services to your particular needs and business objectives.
If you’re serious about making your website work, you should hire a professional digital agency. When you work with agency, you are paying for their expertise, skill set and their experience.
A high quality agency can also handle complex problem solving, will take time out to understand your business, will adapt your website design to the needs and likes of your target audience and provide you with unique functionalities that cheap web designers can’t even come up with in their wildest dreams.
Remember that all the great websites you see on internet are not made by those cheap web designers – a lot of thought and expertise would have worked numerous hours to produce such a fantastic result.
Conclusion:
After over 15 years of working in the digital industry, I have learned that being a client can be very hard. With this in mind, I have put together this article to help you understand the website redesign process. I have also put together an eBook that you might also find helpful. Click here to visit our download page.
How ZOFELA can help you?
If you are looking a digital partner to work on your website design project, please do give us an opportunity to quote on your project. Although, we are based in China, we have clienteles all over China.
We’ve helped designed over 900 websites since we started our agency back in 2007. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can design your website that could help you generate more sales enquiries for your business.
