Instead of a simple website redesign, spring for something with a ROI.
Simply throwing money at a new look doesn’t always make you more money. As a matter of fact, it can often hurt your online business and cause your sales to decrease. Before you start talking to a designer about your online presence, here are a few things you must insist on being a top priority during your project.
1. Focus on A Self-Diagnosing Navigation
While navigation often seems to be an afterthought for many design projects, it should be a critical component of your initial discovery session. Your navigation will mean the difference in a visitor actually finding what they are looking for or leaving your site after a few seconds. We approach navigation development with a highlight on a self-diagnosing structure and flow. We want the visitor to be able to identify where they need to go next from any page on the site. Don’t make your audience think. Make it simple for them or they will leave your site and find a competitor.
2. Focus on Conversions
Conversions are the basis for ROI on any website property. Ensuring that your pages are optimized for those conversions is imperative for building a business online that is profitable. After all, it is cheaper to convert more of the traffic that you already have than to attract more prospects. Every sales page’s content, images, forms and buttons should be optimized and tested to ensure they deliver the highest rate of return as possible.
3. Focus on Sales and Marketing Integration
The interaction between your company and your online prospects should not stop when they leave your website. Sales and Marketing Integration is one way to continue the conversation off of your website on social, SMS and email channels. Setting up this integration should be on the “must haves” list for your next website overhaul.
Building in landing and sales pages that encourage this continued interaction needs to happen before your new site goes live. Integration with automation platforms such as Hubspot, Infusionsoft, or SharpSpring will streamline your management of prospect interactions and provide lead scoring functionality throughout your sales funnel.
4. Use a CMS That Fits Your Strategy
With the level of dynamic flexibility most websites require to be relevant, a simple HTML website is worthless. A business of any size needs to have the flexibility to regularly update their website and post fresh content to accommodate their marketing strategy.
Content marketing has become a cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy. Choosing a CMS that fits your business’ level of IT competency and your marketing team’s needs is critical to being effective in online marketing. Whether you choose WordPress, Joomla!, or any other platform, just be sure it will serve your needs.
5. Be Available To The World
Now, it’s 2015 and we shouldn’t have to even bring this up; but there is obviously still a need based on what we are seeing on the web. With having to accommodate so many device styles, operating systems, and sizes, websites must be both cross device and browser compatible in order to be effective.
Before your website is launched, you must test your website on a variety of browsers, devices and screen sizes to ensure you are actually available to the world. If you fail to display your site on even a fraction of devices on the market, you could be sacrificing a large portion of your business.
Businesses need to stop thinking of their website as a single online property or an online brochure. Your website is in reality a marketing platform that should be the hub for your business online. Start giving it the attention it needs.
