02 May 5 Things to Consider When Redesigning Your Website (Video)
Every few years it’s vitally important that we look at redesigning our websites; as technology changes and consumer expectations change, we must stay up to date. Here’s my top 5 things your must remember when redesigning your website.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/idk21xAVZx0
Hi there. My name is Paul Barrs from PaulBarrs.com. Thanks very much for taking the time to stop by and watch this video. Now today, we’re talking about things to consider when redesigning a website or I guess designing a brand new one from start.
Now, this is something which we did at PaulBarrs.com at the end of last year. Redesign, completely build a brand new website. Good lessons learned and I’m looking to sharing them with you right now. So if you’re taking notes, grab your pen and paper and jot these things down. I have just five, five incredible things to share with you that will help you the next time you get around to doing a website redesign.
Number one, page content. Now page content, of course, is the most important thing. It’s all about what the user, the visitor comes to look at. Whether they’re reading information about a service, whether they’re buying a product, page content is what the customer sees.
But from a redesign point of view, it’s very important that you spend some time planning your page content. What is it that you want to say differently perhaps from your current message? How can you improve on what you’re doing? These are the questions that we need to ask before we begin.
So I suggest that you sit down, perhaps with a notepad and pen, and you jot down your most important pages. It’s exactly what I did. Wrote them all down and went “Mm. Okay, so if this one now says this, maybe I can tweak it a little bit to say that and improve the message and look at, of course, improving conversions.” And that is the whole point, isn’t it? More leads, more sales, more conversions online, that’s what we’re looking for.
And that, of course, leads me to point number two. Look at your page goals. What exactly is it that you have as a goal for each page? Do you even have a goal for each page?
Well, I’d like to ask you to consider this in two different ways. Number one is: What is your goal? But number two: What is your customer’s goal?
So think about it like this. Wherever somebody lands on your website, I mean wherever, whatever page they might happen to land on, they can be no more than one click, just one click away from what they are looking for. So once, of course, they find what they are looking for, then they should be no further than one click away from what you are looking for.
What is your goal for the page? Is it a lead? Is it a subscription? Is it a purchase? Is it a contact, or do you just want them to maybe share something on social media? But as you go through and recreate your pages, you should have positive and powerful goals in place so that you can, obviously, do the work that’s required.
Number three. Number three on this list is your page structure. Now, this is a very, very important one as a part of that redesign process. And this is something that we had to sit down and go, “Well, currently, we’ve got our URL and our www.paulbarrs.com/whatever.” And when you’re doing it, you need to think about a little bit of the SEO in this area plus as well as that user experience.
So, guys, look at your current URL structure. That’s what I mean by page structure. Look at the URLs. How easy are they to remember? Do they make sense? Do they have numbers and question marks and all sorts of strange things, or are they just three or four words maximum when it comes to, you know, maybe your-blog-post, for example?
Look at the permalink structure, as it’s called. But also look at it from a site structure point view. How easy is it for a customer to get from this point to that point? I mean, that’s got to be the most important thing, isn’t it, to get them one click from their goal to yours. And that, of course, has something to do with the site structure. Spend some time planning these things out.
Number four on the list, there we go, number four really simple, but not so much for everybody. You need to register and verify your website with Google Search Console, the old Webmaster Tools as it used to be called. So if you’re doing a brand new website, once it’s done, register and verify, and then go through the reports to make sure everything’s working fine.
If you’re doing an upgrade, make sure that you’re registered and verified beforehand. And then when you do the changeover, resubmit your XML site map, recheck your robots.txt file, have a look at all the technical stuff. And, of course, if that isn’t for you, no problem, find someone like me who can do it for you. For us, we do this kind of thing all day, every day.
But here’s the key. If you do this wrong, Google, for example, just might lose track of your website. They might lose track of your pages. They might see you’ve got error after error after error. Worse yet, worse yet, your customers might see error after error after error, and you certainly don’t want that. So get registered with Google Search Console and then spend some time going through the reports, the crawl analysis and so on, finding out what’s wrong or what could be right, better, fixed with your page.
And lastly, but by no means least, I’ve left the best to last, number five is the user experience. So I’m going to suggest that you find some people who can do some user testing on your website. I’m going to suggest that you put together a checklist or download a checklist. We’ve got a great one that I’ve just put together for my site. It’s got a list of absolutely everything that we now have to do it, and it’s going to take me a month to get through it. But I’m going to make sure that absolutely everything is working, that all of those things I’ve just gone through step by step by step in detail are working.
Why? Why? Because for me, being a small business owner, it’s all about generating more leads, more sales, and more customers through my website. That’s what I want. And, you know, I’d like the same for you as well.
These five things really easy to do, and if you can just focus on them, just them and the few things that go with them, it will make a huge difference to your website.
So here they are again. Grab your pen and paper, going through them. Number one, page content, what you say on the page. Two, your page goals and set them up with Google Analytics. I haven’t even covered that side of it yet, but set them up so you can test, track, and measure them to make sure that they’re working. Page structure is also very important. Make it easy for your customers to get from one place to the next. Register with Google Search Console.
And number five, get some user testing done once you’ve done all of those different things. Get them done first and then get the user testing done. If you don’t have people who can do it — and please don’t use friends and family — there are businesses out there that specialize in just that. So Google it and you’ll be able to find someone who can help you out.
All right, there are my top tips for things you should consider when redesigning a website. My name is Paul Barrs from PaulBarrs.com. If you’d like some hints and tips, stop by the website and look it up. I’m sure you’ll be happy with what you find.
Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
