How We Redesigned our Website – Web Redesign Concepts With Purpose
Posted by Tony Meister on Wed, Jul 28, 2010
The first question for any company looking to define, or even redefine itself is -- Who are we? Defining your company’s brand starts with defining who you are, why you’re unique, and what you do differently from others. What is the secret sauce that nobody else has? Do you have a special story, unique history, or rally cry that needs to be expressed?
As we do with any customer, we approached our website with a series of questions surrounding Who, What, Where, How, Why, & When. Although not initially intended, this eventually made it into our navigation and design.
At the 2010 May national unGeeked conference held in Milwaukee, NetSolutions spoke on “Web Design For A Connected World.” We covered the strategies for website redesign which are to attract, measure, and convert prospects to customers.
Not unlike a flower that attracts a bee, drawing customers to your offerings via the Web means effectively conveying your products or services in a way that jumps out. The flower’s color, style, and ability to stand out from other plants provide an alluring landing pad for the pollen famished friend. What holds your prospect long enough to land at what they’re looking for? Is what they’re looking for effectively expressed?
At NetSolutions we realized we’re not just a technology company but creative innovators who know how to solve technical problems. Your Brand is what people expect of you and the purpose of your website is getting the right people to see who you are and then to engage in what you do. Since our secret sauce is having the right solutions for our customers based on genuine creativity, we needed to explain that. So we used the brain as an example. The best way to chase away the myth that a technology company can’t be creative was to creatively explore how each side of the brain works at NetSolutions.
Next, we realized our site needed to have calls to action that could be measured. When considering a site redesign it is imperative to measure what is happening. This post isn’t about analytics, but suffices to say the analytics and tracking of navigation, content, and conversion points are essential when redesigning. We carefully planned our navigation structure to not only leverage SEO, but to ensure accurate reporting on all pages and calls to action in order to see what works. Measurement is critical.
Finally, converting prospects means designing a site that is easy to navigate and easy to win over prospects. When we created our site we did 3 things to facilitate conversion:
1) We created content on our landing pages that matched the corresponding call-to-action statement.
2) We limited required fields to ease entry on our forms.
3) We established a CMS structure of flexible sections of the site to make it easy to trial different templates and designs within our calls to action.
There is much more to talk about when redesigning a site. However, sticking to the 3 main points of attracting, measuring, and converting will get you on your way as it did for us.