How To Redesign a Website Successfully

How To Redesign a Website Successfully

This “How to Redesign a Website” guide looks at a number of aspects relevant to both the process and the desired outcomes.

How to Redesign a Website

Some consider improving functionality, updating, improving and/or expanding content. Few evaluate current page rankings and strive to retain them.

Almost no one applies best redesign practice by providing search engines with accurate 301 redirections from old pages to replacement pages…

How to ensure Redesign Makes Things Better

Before you leap “boots and all” into a redesign of your website, it’s imperative to consider how your website redesign services provider will ensure that you achieve more than a much prettier site that even more people will find. It’s important to remember that the current site has some inherent ranking value and that this value should at least be preserved – and preferably, enhanced!

All too often, the old site is junked, and no consideration is given to the residual values within old pages. So, don’t go down that path…

Many NZ website redesign specialist has limited understanding (or interest) in how search engines evaluate websites, and remain blissfully unaware of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.  However, most designers do instinctively know what looks good, and how best to achieve a professional-looking site… Obviously, you want a positive outcome in terms of;

  1. Visual  Aspects – user experience, modern design, better business credibility, clear branding
  2. Functionality – social media integration & responsive mobile design access
  3. Structure – optimal navigation, cross-linking, indexing and error handling
  4. Security – preventative measures to minimise hacking opportunities
  5. Risk Management – implement robust automated backups of data and files to Cloud storage
  6. Increased Search Engine Rankings & qualified traffic, higher retention rates and returns
  7. Improved conversion rates via clear Unique Selling Proposition and Call To Action (USP & CTA)

Therefore, when planning how your NZ web designer will redesign your web site, take a holistic approach and try and identify and eliminate all possible inhibitors. As with any project plan, the more obstacles you identify and remove prior to setting out, the easier the route to a successful outcome!

What does Google Reward?

Actually, Google is pretty clear about what constitutes a “good” website, both in terms of website content quality and technical aspects. If you would like to be rewarded with good Google rankings, it stands to reason that if you adhere to the industry’s guidelines and rules, you’ll stand a better chance of success. Perhaps a good first step is to take a read through the helpful and constructive suggestions that Google’s web design guidelines have provided on how to redesign a website for viewers…

How to Deliver Good Content

Write new, original and informative page content – don’t copy other’s efforts. Copying is both illegal and immoral and immediately portrays your website as second-rate. For example; in every niche of the travel industry there are dozens of websites that shamelessly copy and publish entries from Wikipedia verbatim!  The first to copy a page is at best 2nd best… If you’ve come to the party late, you might be the 25th or the 100th copycat… In those circumstances, expecting top billing on Google rankings is a leap of faith!

Page Load Speed & User Experience

Older sites are characterised by table-based layouts, and/or generated by old-fashioned software such as MS Frontpage etc. Modern sites are characterised by their adherence to the latest HTML/CSS standards, in the current version of content management systems.

There is a higher probability of the user’s experience being “better” on a modern website than on a site that is still using out-moded design techniques in manually edited, hand-coded pages. However, your design must address Google CWV and speed optimisation is important because you’ll be penalised for a slow-loading site.

Social Media Integration

Integration with social media is not really optional in this day and age, but you need to ensure your designer understands what aspects and elements are most important. Your Facebook business page is never likely to become more important than your business website… Plastering a “Follow Us” button for your Facebook Business page on every page of your website is less useful than adding the option to “Share” or “Like” each individual page on your site…

Mobile Responsive Design

This aspect of website design/ redesign becomes more and more important every day! The use of tablets and smartphones continues to increase at an extraordinary rate, and for many people, it’s the most common way to access the web. Engineering small-screen browsing for mobile users of your website could well be a make-or-break business decision in some niche markets.

A fixed-width business website does not render well for smartphone users. Not addressing that means you are effectively severing yourself from more and more potential customers every day!

The best solution is to use a mobile-friendly responsive design that adjusts automatically to the screen resolution of the device, regardless of whether it is a PC, laptop, netbook, tablet or smartphone.

Design Functionality

Visitor Expectations

Visitors expect consistency across pages, with logical navigation that makes it easy to move around (and get back to) the various sections of your website. Visitors want the answers or information that their search led them to believe your site contained…

They also expect that you will provide pathways or indications of what actions you would like them to take in order to initiate a relationship with you. They will respond positively to obvious credibility indicators such as testimonials, privacy policies, terms and conditions, your unique selling proposition etc. Calls to action are required – don’t make your guests guess what you want from them… Do provide obvious contact options.

  • Aside from good navigation, a site map page is also a useful tool that can save time in zeroing in on the right information.
  • Ensure page names reflect their contents, and have consistent Titles and page headings that minimise confusion.

Search Engine Considerations

Search Engines want clear paths throughout the site to all content therein. A high-priority item should be an automated XML sitemap that updates whenever new content is added, be it pages or blog posts.  The location of that sitemap must be specified in the robots.txt file. Both of these files are frequently overlooked by website designers, who don’t always appreciate their significance. Those files, plus an HTML sitemap are also a recommended component of all website SEO packages.

Navigation is also crucial to search engines. Not only does it provide pathways through the site, it also allows mapping of the site’s structure and interconnectivity. Elements such as cross-linking, number of links to pages, links from the Home page to internal pages etc. also profile the respective importance of pages throughout the website.

Search engines, even more so than visitors, are reliant on descriptive elements such as page names, titles and headings. As they index a site, they calculate its relevancy to specific search phrases based on the content and its descriptive indicators! Getting that right is the difference between prominence and obscurity…

Search engines are not engineered to reward mediocrity, duplication, plagiarism or sneaky tricks… They can’t read or index Flash slide shows or JavaScript-generated content…  Feed them quality fodder and they will smile down upon you!

Visual Aesthetics

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder… That said, no matter how much makeup you apply, a pig is still a pig – even in a pink dress and a parasol… There are web design content elements that you ignore at your peril. If you are gushing with enthusiasm for mixed fonts, funky colour combinations and whizzbang Flash slideshows, your website designer is probably looking progressively less enthusiastic…

Conversely, if your website designer is waxing lyrical about whizzbang Flash slide-shows and JavaScript etc, you’d best cripple that at the outset. Thank him for his interest and tell him you’ve just remembered an urgent appointment for a frontal lobotomy and that you’ll be in touch…

Eight Redesign Fundamentals

The possibilities for woe are many and varied, including the flip side of many of the positive suggestions above. Conversely, the risks are almost entirely mitigated by a little bit of careful planning! The devil is in the details, and many website designers are blissfully unaware that there is in fact a “best practice” alternative to the more usual ‘brute-force’ redesign methods…

The smart way to approach the process is to get an expert overview, by way of a website SEO audit report. That will give you a benchmark of the current site’s performance,  an outline of the negative aspects, and recommendations for remedial actions. Use that to help guide your website designer in the right direction.

  1. The most common failure, and arguably the biggest single risk, is not providing a site-wide 301 Redirect pathway from all old page names to all new page names. That immediately sets you on the path to having your entire old site de-indexed, vapourises your rankings, and resets your website back to zero at Google HQ. Your 404 Page Not Found error rate will skyrocket… very bad form indeed, old chap! Build a URL LIST in a spreadsheet, to ensure you know which old pages go where. Get that translated into 301 Redirections for your .htaccess file…
  2. The second is not identifying which pages are currently contributing the most visitor traffic. Your website traffic logs will show you which pages generate the most activity AND what search phrases are currently pulling in the most visitors to your website. Review, ponder, preserve and preferably enhance those in the redesign… Then, ensure you have pages that fill the void where you are not getting any qualified traffic.
  3. Thirdly – getting sucked into inappropriate technologies such as Flash animations with built-in navigation, or JavaScript menu systems. Crippling a website redesign with impenetrable navigation can never, ever be seen as a step in the right direction.
  4.  Fourthly; choosing to not use every available mechanism by which the website’s content can be accurately described and categorised. That includes search-engine-friendly (verbose) page and image file names, accurate descriptive titles, headings, image alt tags, site maps etc. This is very basic stuff, but most websites I review are devoid of even SEO 101 For Dummies tactics.
  5. Fifth; understand and ensure you avoid anything that can be considered in breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  6. Sixth; get over your aversion to Social Media and ensure it is used correctly, and to the best effect…
  7. Seventh; while you are at it, embrace the concept of mobile access. Give very serious consideration to a mobile responsive design that renders correctly on all screen sizes from desktop PCs down to tablets and smartphones!
  8. Last but not least – do prepare original, thoughtful, helpful, constructive and informative page content with good illustrative images as and where appropriate. Rebuilding the website will serve little or no purpose if its content is not clearly better than that which went before!

How To Redesign a Website – The Bottom Line

If you address as many of the above web content quality, structural and functional aspects as you can, you will significantly increase your chances of a successful outcome. Think it through, get some expert assistance and advice, and plan it all carefully.

None of this is overly complicated – it’s merely attention to detail and avoiding known pitfalls. Still, it never ceases to amaze me how many people get it so wrong and disappear from the upper levels of the search engine results pages. Sure, things may bounce back even if the website redesign is done badly…  The point is that when you do it right, the initial rankings trajectory is upward, not downward!

Why not get a professional website redesign quote?

Further Reading

I’ve previously written a series of articles on the topic of website design that explain more of the do’s and don’t, and alert you to the serious pitfalls along the way.  For further in-depth reading, the links are as follows;

External References:

Godaddy – website redesign checklist 9 steps for a stunning site

Page last Updated on 1st October 2023 by the author Ben Kemp