Hello there! Welcome to this blog where we talk about different ways to get the most out your website through website redesign and take it to the next level. Technology is advancing so quickly that new devices can be considered old fashioned and out dated after merely three or four years. This is true of all devices like phones, tablets, mp3 players, and yes, even websites. Being a business in this day and age requires you to constantly update your content and technology. In the 21st century, it all comes down to what the consumers can see and have easy access to. This means having a good website and typically a presence in social media. Company owners may find this frustrating, but they have to consider or keep in mind why it is important — even essential — to their growth and success. Basically, it makes your customers happy, saves you time and money, and keeps you well-connected and up to date regarding what the people want. As a company, you need to be visible, and this visibility needs to impress. If you already have a website, you must know about the importance of website redesign. You must see big online companies like Pinterest, Amazon, Facebook, Wikepedia etc constantly updating their content and websites to make them more accessible to the consumers and also at the same making the website easier to use.
What is website redesign? Redesign means to modernize, change or improve something that already exists while staying true to the initial guidelines. In the case of making a website it will obviously be designed or redesigned and manufactured with the latest technology available and keeping all the needs of the customer in mind, the company logo, remaining faithful to the graphics of the corporate identity.
There are many steps involved in the website redesign process:
Step 1: Evaluation
Identify what is working and what isn’t. Identify what the strengths and weakness of your current website are and benchmark your current data (both metrics and analytics).
Step 2: Identify your goals
Identify your goals and picture what the end result will be. What is your ultimate goal? Are you just looking for a more professional website or are you hoping to get more leads and sales? Whatever your goals are clarity is an absolute must in order to create a website redesign strategy that meets your expectations.
Step 3: Strategy Creation
The website redesign team will outline a plan for achieving those goals based on your needs. To develop a more professional image then look in depth at competitors’ websites, as well as websites you like outside your industry, to get a better understanding of what your competitors can likely do and how you can make your website better.
Step 4: Assess
Assess and outline whatever major changes you want added or removed from the current website design.
Step 5: Implementation
This is the actual making process where all necessary things are done, from wireframes, mock ups to viewing of sitemaps. Necessary changes can be made along the way.
Step 6: Review and Launch
Final part is testing the website. Run and test the website to ensure that it is functional, error free, that the forms work and most important the website works across all browsers and devices seamlessly. If there are no problems, then launch the website.
When do you know your website needs a redesign? The following will explain:
- It isn’t Mobile Optimized: This is the most important indication that your website requires an update! If you can’t view your own business website on a mobile device, neither can your customers. With the increasing usability of mobile devices to browse the internet, it has been important for quite some time to update your site to be mobile friendly. According to Blue Corona, consumers spend more than five hours on their mobile devices. In 2018, 52.2% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones. 51% of customers say that they use mobile devices to discover new brands and products and 69% of smart phone users also say that they are more likely to buy from companies with mobile sites that easily address their questions or concerns (BrightEdge, 2017). So it is pretty obvious that if your website isn’t available on mobile devices, the customers are going to look elsewhere. Within just a few months, more people will be surfing the web from their smart phones and tablets than from their desktop computers. Don’t waste time on letting things run their own course. If your website isn’t where the consumers are, your website will become invisible and solely for this reason, you most definitely need a website redesign.
- Invisible to Search Engines: If you go to Google, Bing or any other search engine and search for a product or service you will find a long list of companies that provide those things. The best and most popular websites show up on the first page. Getting on this first page is another major goal your website needs to meet, because let us face it; nobody looks at the second page of a search result. Ask yourself, does your website show up on the first page of search results? If not, your website needs some serious search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is ultimately about providing the user with the easiest, fastest, best experience possible and a search engine wants to provide the user with what they are looking for, and when it can do that, both parties are happy. We know that a happy visitor will become a returning visitor. By investing in SEO you will be providing search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo critical information so they will place your site in the top 5 spots on the returns page. You can find out more about what SEO is here.
- Change with Advancements in Business and Dated Look: Another reason one might need a website redesign is that it hasn’t kept up with changes in the business. Outdated information can confuse and irritate your customers and cause problems for your staff as well. Thus your content needs to be up to date with clear and important information. If the website is over three to four years old, the website is likely to be lagging behind in design trends. Three or four years is a long time in the website design world and, when your website is just running for the main basic reason, it is tempting and easy to put a website redesign on hold.
Over the years, the creative world of the web redesign has progressed and the competition to capture the customer’s attention just keeps becoming more intense. From different quick tips like hand-made illustrations and page motion animations to dynamic gradients and responsive logos, business websites need to be redesigned to be fresh, memorable and maybe even innovative and inspirational. Web designers often notice that despite what they tell you most clients make their decisions emotionally or personally as opposed to logical decisions so it is important to be visually appealing. An updated and modern design is not just for aesthetic; it is one of the key factors in the customer’s purchasing decision. If this is the website redesign, you website will be more reliable and trustworthy. It will also look more professional and give your business that extra edge over other business websites.
- No Consumer Value: A potential visitor may visit your website once, but if they do not find anything helpful, useful or valuable to them, they will not return. So in addition to current product and service information, you have to fill your website with customer-focused content (like regularly-updated and informative blogs, exclusive mobile web design content, etc.) that keeps the customers coming back for more. It must be understood that a strategy made many years ago might have been to get as many enquiries as possible through an onsite contact form. Today, though, businesses are trying to build authority through blogging and email subscriptions. The aim of the business website is or should be to help generate leads, enquiries or direct sales — depending on the nature of the services being provided. If your marketing activities are constant but you are seeing a decrease in your online sales or leads, it could be a sign that your website is not connecting with your audience.
Whether it is an out dated content-management system (CMS) or a poorly designed call-to-action area (CTA), a lack of key website features will act as an obstacle in your marketing process. If your strategy today is extremely different from when you started your business, it is only natural that your website is evolving to align with your goals and marketing efforts.
- Website just isn’t Working: Being forced to wait forever for pages to load only to be presented with broken links, outdated offers, and a layout that isn’t optimized for a modern day browser is major deal breaker. Not only is it frustrating, it makes the customer less likely to view that website as being reliable. The website might not be at this level of broken, but certain areas of the website may be old and in need of an update. For example, maybe the website hasn’t been optimized for the latest browsers, or there is linking to old pages that no longer exist and were never properly redirected. These issues may seem small, but they play a significant role in the overall effectiveness of your website. Neglecting this for too long can have a significant impact on your traffic and marketing efforts.
Dynamic websites are very useful in website redesign. The biggest advantage of having a dynamic website is that they can be easily updated as per the needs of the business. When using dynamic website design, it is far easier to update and manage the website. Instead of needing to create new pages, you can change your pages as things change. This is particularly useful if you’ve hired a website designer because calling a webmaster so they can make changes to your site can cost you a lot of money. Part of running a website today is being able to customize your actions to the needs of your customers. People browse as individuals, and demand to be treated as such. Whether that means using social media buttons or the collection of cookies, dynamic website design allows you to do all of the things mentioned. This gives you a chance to know more about your visitors and give them the best experience possible. In a dynamic website, you have all of your content organized in a database which makes it much easier to manage and edit. For example, if you uploaded a certain number posts on your website on a certain topic, in a dynamic website you can simply search and filter according to topic and delete those posts all at once.
Dynamic have many interactive features that users have come to expect from modern websites. By investing in these websites, you show how serious you are about your business.
Well, hello there! Welcome to this blog, where we talk about web designing, its fundamentals and its importance. I see you have gone against the title and have chosen to read this blog. Let me tell you, web designing may be something that’s very technical in nature, but it is also a form of art. Every website is a story and it’s the web design that tells that story either visually or with words. Developing a good web design requires creativity and a bit of intuition and by reading this blog, you’ve already exhibited the trait of being curious! Curiosity is a great motivator for self learning and self learning plays a huge role in web design. Website design is a domain that requires you to constantly be on your toes by learning about new developments and techniques. Website designing requires great communication skills to get a clear and precise message across.
What is website designing? To put it simply, website designing is the process of creating websites. It includes several different aspects of a website, such as web page layout, content production, and graphic design. It is essential to note that while the terms ‘web design’ and ‘web development’ are often used interchangeably, web design is technically a subset of the broader category of web development.
Fundamentals:
We have been talking about web designing but are you aware of how basic web designing is done? It is important to lay down the fundamentals of web designing:
- The Technicalities of aWebsite
Websites are created using a markup language called Hypertext MarkupLanguage (HTML). Web designers build web pages using HTML tags that define the content and metadata of each page. The layout and appearance of the elements within a webpage are typically defined using CSS, or cascading style sheets. Therefore, most websites include a combination of HTML and CSS that defines how each page will appear in a browser.
Others use different types of editors. These editors provide a visual interface for designing the webpage layout and the software automatically generates the correspondingHTML and CSS code. Another popular way of web design is with a system likeWordPress. This provides a different website template that can be used as a starting point for a new website. Webmasters can then add content and customize the layout using a web-based interface.
While HTML and CSS are used to design the look and feel of a website, images must be created separately. Therefore, graphic design may overlap with web design, since graphic designers often create images for use on the Web.
To know more about how to actually make a web page, there’s a great wikiHow article available here.
- Design
Design, obviously, is a key part of web design. It includes the principles of design(balance, contrast, unity etc.) and the design elements (lines, shapes, texture, color etc.). It is essential to base the design around the knowledge on the target audience. The audience must be considered first and then the required elements may be added or removed from the web design.
The audience must understand what the website has been designed for at the first glance. Thus images, symbols, logos etc are more effective and useful in website designing. Use imagery and icons to communicate whenever possible in your web design. There are some universal icons that people are trained to respond to. The magnifying glass (search), the house (home page) and floppy disk (save) are ingrained into your users already.Take advantage of those visual shortcuts while web designing.
Color makes all the difference, especially as our screens get better on our phones and tablets. It is a facet of design that can be a really key part of the story your website design wants to tell. Just use color to support content, not decorate a page and often if you are using a photo, the colors in the web design should be sampled from the photos used so your web design has a nice unified feel. One of the best rules to go with is to use complimentary colors so as to have a balance of both warm and cold colours in the website.
Choose fonts that support the content! There are literally thousands of fonts to choose from. It is up to the web designer to mix and match – but they must remember that it’s best practice to use only up to three fonts at a time—a nice headline font, one for the main body of text, and then one for any sort of call-out the web designer might need.
There are two ways websites are generated:
A static website design stores a unique file for every page of a static website. Each time that webpage is requested, the same content is returned. This content is created once, during the design of the website. It is usually manually authored, although some sites use an automated creation process, whose results are stored long-term as completed pages.
The benefits of a static website designs are that they are simpler to host, as their server only needed to serve static content, not execute server-side scripts. This required less server administration and had less chance of exposing security holes. They could also serve pages more quickly, on low-cost server hardware. These advantage became less important as cheap web hosting expanded to also offer dynamic features, and virtual servers offered high performance for short intervals at low cost.
Almost all websites have some static content, as supporting assets such as images and style sheets are usually static, even on a website with highly dynamic pages.
Dynamic websites are generated on the fly and use server-side technology to generate web pages. They typically extract their content from one or more back-end databases: some are database queries across a relational database to query a catalogue or to summarise numeric information, others may use a document database to store larger units of content, such as blog posts or wiki articles. The skill set needed to develop dynamic web pages is much broader than for a static page, involving server-side and database coding as well as client-side interface design. Even medium-sized dynamic projects are thus almost always a team effort.
Both of these approaches have now been supplanted for many websites by higher-level application-focused tools such as content management systems.These build on top of general purpose coding platforms and assume that a website exists to offer content according to one of several well recognised models, such as a wiki or a user forum. These tools make the implementation of such a site very easy, and a purely organisational and design-based task, without requiring any coding.
Editing the content itself can be done both in the site itself, and with the use of third-party software.The ability to edit all pages is provided to a specific category of users (for example, administrators, or registered users). In some cases, anonymous users are allowed to edit certain web content, which is less frequent (for example, on forums – adding messages). An example of a site with an anonymous change is Wikipedia.
Importance:
Website Designing is now essential! Its importance is growing with the advancement of technology, especially for businesses and companies that want to take their profits to the next level and reach more people.
In today’s day and age, not having an online presence is unimaginable! Everything is now online and highlighting your online presence is very important. The basic element that makes up an online presence is web design. The website design can either make or break a business. What makes big e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Nykaa, and MakeMyTrip so popular?
The answer to this question is great website designing! You see, when it comes to website designing, communication and knowledge of what the target audience is important. The above mentioned e-commerce websites were designed to make the websites:
- Easy to find! This is essential when your website has many web pages. It must be noted that when website navigation is developed well in the website design, users can easily explore and understand your website. A simple navigation is the best for both the web design and users.
- Deliver an accurate message! Readers tend to remember a message when it is concise and they can relate to it. Overdoing the visuals in the web design leads to can lead to a visual cluster which makes the website disinteresting.
- By making the website look more welcoming and trustworthy to visitors. The traffic of the website increases, and there is an improvement or boost in promotions of the business.
- By organizing and SearchEngine Optimization! As we all know, it is most comfortable to read a book from left to right, up and down. We read web pages in the similar manner. While website designing, the designers use the same reading pattern. It is because of this reason that designers put most of the important information in the upper left area of the web page. It increases the chances of relaying your message to the visitors who can become your customers. Aside from organization, utilizing the visible areas for important website details can also improve the search engine optimization or SEO. This happens when related key words are incorporated in the HTML text. This gives search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing an opportunity to crawl into your website easily, increasing your search engine placement (higher in the search results) and give your website or firm a more overall visibility.
At the most basic level, a business should invest in some level of web design because their businesses are most likely to do the same. If your site looks poorly made by an amateur, and a direct competitor’s site look professionally made and trustworthy, potential customers will choose your competitor. You can go even further than simply bringing your website up to par with the competition, however. Investing in web design is a great way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Most businesses within an industry have essentially the same resources available to them when building their services. Web design is the one of the only areas where a business can go above and beyond, making the business appear to be the obvious choice through a gorgeously made website.
There are two primary jobs involved in creating a website:the web designer and web developer, who often work closely together on a website. The web designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which includes the layout, coloring and typography of a web page. Further jobs involved in web design include graphic designing (create visuals for the site such as logos, layouts and buttons), SEO writers to recommend the correct words to be incorporated within the website design, internet marketing specialists etc.
The growing popularity of online shopping and virtual communication is confusing or even scary to the some. Web design is a great way to create a user-friendly environment where people come for helpful tips and best practices.