Crucial components to successful website redesign

JOEL KOENIGS

President of Technology

Risdall Marketing Group

joel@risdall.com

risdall.com

Topic: Marketing/ Communications

Many of the factors that lead to a successful website redesign are based on experience, ability, creativity, and chemistry of your project team, but the foundations are based on the same principles that produce success in any project. Three of the most important are setting goals, measuring effectiveness and protecting your investment.

Set goals. Perhaps your company just merged with another company, is undergoing a major internal reorganization, or is about to undertake a major re-branding effort to support a new product release. These are all good reasons to undertake redesign projects, but be sure to properly articulate the objectives for the redesign and align them with the organization’s overall goals. Properly setting this cornerstone is an important first step on the road to success.

Measure effectiveness. A recent study* of small businesses by UK Web hosting company Fasthosts reports that 43 percent of those studied do not measure the effectiveness of their website, admitting they have “no quantifiable method of measuring whether their website is effective.” Of those that perform some measurement, many do not go much deeper than simple web statistics and only about one-third of respondents perform any path analysis to determine how visitors actually use their website. Even more striking, less than a quarter of those firms attempt to make any determination as to the return on investment of their website.

I’d like to think perceptions and behaviors are largely different here in the U.S., but experience says otherwise. Line items for measurement and reporting are often the first to be struck from the budget, along with efforts to drive traffic to the site and ongoing site management. Without effective measurement how will you know if the website is meeting your goals? Furthermore, without analysis of site usage, how will you know where and how to evolve your site to meet the changing needs of your users?

Protect your investment. Commitment to content updates is important to a site’s effectiveness, especially when it comes to those that utilize blogs, forums, and other tools that invite user-generated content. User posts or comments need to be answered in a timely manner for positive interactions with new and existing users.

In addition, it is crucial to keep site content up to date. Continual upkeep and optimization of a website can lead to improvements in search engine visibility, user satisfaction, lead conversion and support of other marketing activities (e.g., social media, banner advertising, print and e-mail marketing campaigns). All of these will affect overall attainment of goals. Invest in management of your web property as you would any other property and it will provide returns.