The Two Principal Approaches to Redesigning Your Website

The question that occupies everyone that wants to redesign his or her website is will entail a complete overhaul of the website’s design, layout, content and user experience? Most companies go for the jugular when redesigning their website, ending up with budgets overshooting but conversions plummeting. So what is the right website redesign strategy? Will a mere redesign lift your sales and revenue? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this article. 

 

Traditional Website Redesign

The first step in website redesign is to analyse risk. Risk analysis involves enumerating the number of changes that you make in redesigning the website and also the scale and impact of those changes. Let us say that you propose to change your home page title and layout as also the navigation bar. Now the first two fall under the category of sweeping changes as their reach and impact on the customer’s mind is more pronounced. 

 

Some of the most common changes that people do in a website redesign is:

• Changing the home page title(s)
• Changing the images and icons
• New graphic designs with headlines
• Changed call-to-action buttons
• New navigation and forms
  
  

The Right Approach

The right web design approach would have a mechanism in place to measure the changes in web design against user traffic on the website. The key is to undertake a redesign that improves user experience while conforming to the same objectives that your business is built on.

This can be done only with the help of a correct conversion optimization strategy. Formulate proper test cases with timely executions and separate them from one another to make informed inferences about user preferences. This would mean getting the right alpha and beta tests to mitigate risk.

Evolutionary Site Design

A much better way to redesign your website would be to undertake what is called Evolutionary Site design (ESR). This approach posits continuous improvement in place of a complete overhaul in website design.

In ESR, you need to separately list out all components of your website in order of customer preference. From home page titles to product page templates to service value proposition statements, you need to measure and test every component step by step against customer traffic.

This way, you not only bring about a more gradual and well thought out design change that can be fully measured and also rolled back in parts. So, which way are you going to go?

5 Steps to Success in eCommerce

If you are planning to build an ecommerce website for your business, then you must have a clear idea of what you’re going to do at the start. What is ecommerce? It is simply the process of transacting business, namely the buying and selling of goods over the internet. But with maddening competition and rising customer expectation you need to ensure you have the right strategy in place to take you to the top. So, what do you need to get right?

1. Unclutter The Sales Process 

 

When you design your website, look at how many clicks a customer has to make before he eventually makes the purchase. Study after study has found that the primary reason why people abandon a shopping cart before making a purchase is due to the number of stages that they need to pass before finally making a payment.

2. Are Your Customers Aware of Product Availability?

The customer needs to know beforehand whether the product he wants to buy is available or not. Customers get annoyed when they make the effort to order the product, add it to the catalog, and get until the ‘purchase’ button only to find that the product itself is unavailable. The customer will go, in this case never to return.

3. Make Your Site Compatible Across Browsers

Cross-browser compatibility is essential if your business is to reach customers across boundaries. Browser preferences vary across the world, and though Chrome has become the numero uno in that category, other browsers still hold sway over large populations and you need to ensure that your ecommerce website is perfectly viewable in them.

4. Use Graphics, But Make Them Simple

Images are better than words and Graphics do play a positive role in enriching the overall customer experience. But make sure you don't have too much of them so they take a toll on your website performance. Optimize your graphics for the web or otherwise your website may take too long to load and kill the very purpose of attracting more customers.

5. Move Towards a One-Step Checkout Process 

 

However responsive and well-designed your website may be, the customer will not make a purchase on your website without your payment system being secure and efficient. Host your website on a secure server and make sure your payment system is PCI-DSS compliant, has email and multi-payment options and is customized for your website.

5 Steps to Sucess in #eCommerce - http://t.co/Oujsaf8OgK

— Lydia Shah (@Lydia_shah) September 8, 2015