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?