Is Your Website’s Design Ruining Your Success?

Sometimes the only thing holding your business back from success may be your current design. Learn how you can assess whether this is the case for your business, and find out what you can do to get back on track.

Photo by Thiru Murugan

How do you know if you need to redesign your website?

Obviously, a redesign is a cost that needs to be justified, and a website should not be redesigned just “for the sake of a redesign”. Perhaps you are not getting the response from the market you expected based on your research. Assuming your website copy (quality of writing) is good and your product or service is still in demand, you may need a redesign.

The best way to decide if you need a redesign is to get feedback from your target market. Ideally this would include all those visitors that came to your website, and were put off by your outdated design. Realistically, collecting information from these people is difficult unless you have a large marketing budget. Instead, poll clients (although bear in mind, they are likely to be biased towards your design), friends and family (bear in mind they also are likely to be highly biased), visit rivals’ websites (only the successful ones please!), and if you can, get feedback from web designers, or other online communities. There are a number of websites that offer informal free critiques of your website. Here are a couple:

• Graphic Design Network
• Web Forumz

Another way you may identify you need a redesign is from looking at your website statistics (e.g. Google Analytics or HitTail). If your website is attracting traffic, but there is a high bounce rate (percentage of visitors leaving straight away), or low conversion rate (e.g. few visitors are buying your product) then it may be your design that is letting you down. For example, your design may not highlight the way your visitors can purchase your products. By changing your design to make your “Buy now” button stand out, you may increase your conversion dramatically. On the other hand, if you website is not getting much traffic at all, it is more likely that your marketing is letting you down, rather than your design. (Bear in mind that poor content may also be the cause of a high bounce rate or low conversion rate.)

What does a redesign involve?

In a well coded website, the design and the content are separately coded. The content code is in the HTML, but the design code is in one or more separate files called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Therefore, to make the redesign live, the reference to the CSS is changed in the content code. Once this is done, the new design will be seen by visitors, and the old CSS can be deleted. The power of separating design and content is demonstrated in the CSS Zen Garden where you can see hundreds of different designs applied to the same content. Real Free Websites recently underwent a redesign which was straightforward as the design and the content are coded entirely separately.

If your website has old or invalid code, then making the switch to your new design is more complicated. The best solution in this case is usually to create a complete copy (mirror) of your site, and then fix the coding for future changes and for accessibility and compatibility. Once the mirrored site is ready, visitors can be redirected to the mirrored site and the original site can be taken down and replaced with the redesign. Finally, the redirection can be removed and the mirrored site can be deleted. If this process is done correctly, there should be no downtime of your website.

How to avoid repeating the same mistakes in a redesign

Before you redesign your website, make sure you know why your old design was not working. You may be able to find this out from feedback you have received about your website or from looking at statistics. Examine your statistics to see the way users have moved through your website. You may find that users fill a shopping cart and then abandon their purchase at the last moment. Why do they do this? Is there a sudden hidden charge? Is there a big, uninviting form to fill out? If you cannot see an obvious reason why your design is not working, double check it is your design and not your service, product or the manner of your selling.

Also useful is to visit your competitors websites to see how they are projecting their image. If you know that a website is gaining a lot of custom, you may decide to imitate some aspects of the design, improving it where possible.

Other factors to consider before redesigning

Downtime when making the switch

If properly handled, there should be no downtime. See “What does a redesign involve”, above.

Regular visitor confusion

If you plan a complete image changeover, you should inform your regular visitors that this is going to happen, or at least provide them with an explanation and description of the changes shortly afterwards, so that they can continue to use your website as they are used to. Not only does this increase their confidence in your website, but it also can help them see why you made the changes you did, and hopefully give feedback on the changes.

A few glitches

Even with the best planning, you will forget to style a small feature of your website. It may be an unordered list in some long forgotten corner of your website that has blue bullet points instead of red ones. Eventually, you will find it, but it may be wrongly styled for a while… Don’t worry too much about these: if you haven’t noticed them, it’s unlikely anyone else has either!

Conclusion

A redesign may be the only thing that is holding back your website from great success. However, before you begin, analyse your market and their reactions to be sure it really is the design that is holding your business back. Redesigning a website with other issues is nothing more than putting a different face on a problem.

Related Articles

• How to Target your Market
• How to Write Your Content
• How to Set Your Website Goal
• A Complete Website Planning Guide
• Thinking about your first website?

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