When revamping an existing web site there are certain important things such as navigation, layout, content etc which must be kept in mind to hold a person’s attention to your web site.
Take a moment and look into your web site. Is it helping your cause in becoming a better company? Is it an extension of your brand identity? Is it easy to navigate, creative enough and make a favorable impression? Are you getting new customers? Are you getting a lot of hits? Are you converting enough of them into leads?
Have you noticed that your competitor's website looks a lot better than yours? Or may be you need a change of pictures - new colors, better content and better navigation throughout your site. You should change your website's design at least once a year if not six months.
-
1. Look and Feel of your web site
The look and feel forms a very important part of your web site to hold a person’s attention. First you have to decide what is the mood or emotion you want to display through your web site medium. It can professional, technical, academic or anything else. Keep these adjectives in mind before designing/redesigning your web site, because your web site is the face of your company.
-
2. Target audience
Decide the top three categories of visitors visiting your web site. Try to get into their shoes and think like them. Write a few words that might interest these people and cause them to respond to your web site.
-
3. Research on your competitors
One should always learn from their past mistakes and swear upon themselves not to repeat them again. Likewise you should analytically at competitors web site and get ideas about the latest web design, technology and communication concepts. You should also make notice of the particular keywords they are using to attract the attention of people coming to search engines.
-
4. Why people should visit your web site
List at least five reasons that why should people visit your web site. They should come to your web site for some information or are in need of your company’s product or service or it can be some other reason.
-
5. Is your web site attractive enough
A visitor who visits your web site should find something interesting which will force him/her to come back to your site. Try to find out something which will force the visitor to bookmark your site. Write or design your web site in such a manner that will be remembered about your web site.
-
6. Critically analyze your existing web site
To improve anything one should always try to find negative things. Same goes for your web site also. Just sit down with your team and critically evaluate your existing web site and try to find out the success and failure of your site. Honestly ask your people what is missing which makes your web site look less attractive. Write down the points and start working on them.
-
7. Content
If it is said that content is the king of your web site which can take your company to greater heights it would not at all be wrong. This is probably why people come to your web site to collect much needed information. The content should be well written, grammatically correct so that it communicates what it is supposed to. Designing a high quality web site is a team effort which starts with selecting the right people who know their job properly. Be it a talented web designer or a web programmer or the web site content writer.
-
8. Role of search engines
Search engines analyze the key words which are written using Meta Tags in the web site code. One should always design a web site keeping in kind the to get good rankings on a search engine with different keywords. Since many pages on your web site can be indexed with a search engine this becomes an important strategy in attracting visitors.
-
9. Analyze Keywords
First decide on your target audience. After that try to make out what are the probable keywords which they use on different search engines. It will be of no interest if you are not getting the right people at your web site because they are not your target. So redesign your web site and move the site content, design and promotion towards the target audience.
-
10. Speed
It happens very rarely when the visitor will wait for the web page to get completely downloaded. You should try to make your web site as light as possible. Just remove any picture or animation which makes your site heavy & acts as a bottleneck for its fast downloading.
-
11. Interaction
Without interaction a visitor or a customer who is dealing with you can probably feel lonely and go away. While designing/redesigning a web site you should always keep in mind that there should be an option given on the web site from where he can easily ask a question about your product or even may ask the status of his order in progress. This type of interaction can make the things flow smoothly.