A 6-Step Guide to Effective Rebranding: Insights From a First-Rate Maryland Web Design Company (sposnored)

Sponsored post courtesy of Weblime:
As a top-rated Maryland web design company, we always have prospects and co-designers asking us:

• What’s your philosophy for a website redesign?
• How do you redesign websites to improve conversions? 
• What content strategy do you adopt when redesigning web pages?

And a whole myriad of other questions about web redesign.
Today, we’ll answer these crucial questions as we share the web redesign process for which our clients love us. Ready? 

How to Effectively Redesign a Website

At Weblime, we use a 6-step process for creating redesigns that increase conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and help our clients win over the race to customers. Here’s what that process looks like:

1. Check Your Current Website’s Performance

You need to know where you stand before making any changes to your website. To do that, we ask questions like:

• What was the goal of the current design?
• Does the current web design attain that goal?
• What works and what doesn’t?
• What are the expectations for the redesigned website?

Armed with answers to these questions, we then conduct QA (quality assurance) tests to check for errors around user experience, documentation, design, etc. If the site’s low conversion stems from simple QA problems, we fix that and voila.

Finding these problems will guide the redesign process and can serve as performance benchmarks for the redesigned process. 

2. Analyze Competitor Websites for Gaps 

At Weblime, we like to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Not necessarily “enemies”, but you need to keep tabs on your competitors if you want to become the go-to problem solver in your niche. That’s why nearly 6 out of every 10 business executives leverage competitive intelligence to monitor competitors and break into new markets.

Analyzing competitor websites gives you insights into where your website is lacking and what you need to do to close that gap. We perform two types of competitor analysis for our redesign process:

1. Quantitative analysis 

As you’d imagine, quantitative analysis focuses on numbers. Think of metrics like organic traffic, backlinks, PPC keywords etc. You can spy on these metrics with free tools like Ubersuggest, SemRush, Ahrefs, etc.

Here’s an example of competitor spying we performed on Adobe:

Source

 

You can then check this info against your metrics to find the gaps and develop ideas to match, if not supersede, these numbers.

2. Qualitative analysis

Qualitative analysis centers around user experience and behavior on your website. What content are visitors consuming the most? What CTAs are converting the most? Etc.

When we conduct competitor analysis for clients, we look at page load speeds, intuitive navigation, screen resolutions, and others. But, our qualitative analysis will be incomplete without analyzing their customer journey. Where does it begin and end?

Typically, the customer journey looks like this:

Home > Features > Pricing > Payment page

We check this journey to find the bottlenecks and speedbumps that give visitors a cause to bounce. Then, we can make an effective redesign plan. 

3. Create a Website Redesign Plan

Now, you need a roadmap for your redesign. 

First, consider why you are redesigning; perhaps you want to increase sales, drive more traffic, or reach a wider audience. Then, establish your KPIs to measure the company’s goals. For an online clothing store, for instance, you’ll want to track metrics like traffic (particularly on your checkout pages), average customer lifetime value, etc. 

Next, develop a new site map, messaging strategy, and an ideal user flow.

A new sitemap allows you to rearrange your current pages, remove outdated ones, and add any missing ones. To comprehend the hierarchy of each page, we like to create a visual sitemap like this one.

Also, excellent web design aims to support and convey the intended message. To accomplish that, you must have distinct knowledge of your message.

In our experience at Weblime, Donald Miller’s StoryBrand architecture is the best messaging technique for successful brands. The StoryBrand framework is simple: it positions your business as a guide on the customer’s journey to finding solutions to their problems.

While redesigning Monarch Prime’s website, we used this framework to understand its pain point and craft the right messaging for its business. The process looks like this:

Source

With this strategy, we then proceed to create an ideal user flow. It helps you think about how users engage with your website, from visitors to qualified leads. Start by optimizing each step of a user’s journey once you have planned how they would navigate your website.

Beginning with a basic user flow, such as the one shown below, is perfectly acceptable. 

Source

 

Simply remember to return and make changes to your website once it launches and gathers more data.

4. Prioritize a Content-First Strategy

According to the content-first strategy, your redesign should complement the concepts and messages you want to convey to your audience. This implies that rather than creating a fancy website to stuff your content into, build a straightforward responsive website based on your gathered data.

The content-first architecture suggests you present your website’s information in the most consumer-oriented way possible. It’s built on the user research information you gather in the prior stages of the redesign process, like the competitor analysis.

5.  Start Creating

After sitemaps, we create mockups. To begin, our design team creates wireframes for the redesigned website. Why? These wireframes project how you organize the content on the new site for improved user experience.

Next, focus on the UI. You need programs like Adobe XD and Figma to embellish your wireframes with colors, logos, and pictures. These mockups and wireframes must describe the altered design elements, unique functionality, and communications to your design team. 

6. Test and Launch

Here, we create a “dummy site” of the redesigned website with a different URL. Then, we invite beta testers to try out the site and collect their experience on the site. This way, we can locate and whack out any bugs and errors before launch.

Whew! Now, you’re ready to go live. 

Pro tip? You need a team of professionals to pull off an effective redesign. Many people realize this down the line and then seek out web design experts to get the job done. By then, they’ve wasted time, money, resources, etc. 

Thankfully, that’s not you.

Talk to an Expert Web Design Company in Maryland

According to Hubspot, 9 out of 10 site visitors bounce because a site is poorly designed. Meaning, you can’t take your web redesign lightly. 

Weblime is a first-rated Maryland web design company focused on helping online businesses grow. Our goal? Building websites that deliver tangible business results. We’ll help you unlock the full potential of your most important digital asset – your website. 

If you’re ready to start serving more customers through your website, you can book a free consultation with any of our web design experts.