Eight easy ways to refresh your website
Refreshing a website is very different to re-designing a website. A redesign looks at the fundamental elements of your website from structure, style, role, content, functionality and more with an impartial view to improving everything it can.
Refreshing a website is a more natural evolution and benefits from an ongoing approach to see what can be enhanced and how these small changes or developments can give new life to your website. The goal of both approaches is to improve your website for your visitors, so it’s important to decide what your users need before embarking on a a full-on redesign project.
What is easier, is to get into the habit of regularly updating and refreshing your website and it’s design to keep it current and your visitors engaged. Here are a few of our tips:
1. Update your content
If you simply wish to lighten the tone of your site or make it more personable you may be looking at simply improving the tone of voice of your copy, adding new copy or offering the answers to your users’ niggling questions. To engage with your visitors you need to offer them essential information that they can rely on.
2. Refresh the imagery, colours and style
Review your use of imagery on the site. Could you use a few new photographs or maybe add a couple of galleries? What about changing the colour or styling within the site. Look at developing tools or functionality that will enhance your website and deliver real value to your visitors in a way that compliments your business.
3. Give people a reason for visiting your website
What are the main reasons why visitors should come to your website? If you’ve not asked yourself this question before, if you’re embarking on a website re-design project now is the ideal time. Your visitors interests and browsing behaviour will inform and direct how you go about creating these changes.
If it’s the first time you’ve done this it may identify others areas for improvement too. You may find users are looking for some functionality or interactivity that’s missing and a new tool or widget would compliment this. You may find that other elements or the way certain content is organised isn’t as intuitive or obvious as presumed. Take this information to streamline your website and improve things from the visitors perspective.
4. Define your website’s target audience
Identifying your user personas is essential in user experience design, and it means more than just looking at the most popular or frequent visitors to you website. You need to understand everything about them from their background, education, job, motivations, interests, hobbies and personal life. It may also be the first time you’ve taken a long hard look at the customers to your business. Put the time in because it can yield some fascinating insights and tangible benefits.
5. Provide content that your audience will want to share
If you know your audience well you can anticipate the content that they will want to read, which will enable you to plan the type of content you should publish. You should also learn how your visitors like to access that information which will then inform your website design and architecture. Often it’s just a matter of re-imagining the content you already publish to appeal more directly to your customers. True understanding of your audience will help you to provide content they can share, from online tools to insightful articles that will get tagged, forwarded, bookmarked, liked and tweeted around the web, spreading the name of your business.
6. Identify areas for improvement
Regularly browse through your entire website with an impartial eye. Try to see it through the eyes of a new visitor and see what you find slow, frustrating or simply clunky. Any areas of stress or weakness should become apparent quite quickly and hopefully the solution shouldn’t be too far away.
A complex page that loads slowly? Spread the content across a section. Images that obscure the content? Look for a simple gallery or slideshow. Content that leads nowhere? Reorganise your content and introduce links or tags which will take visitors on to another page with more useful information about your business.
7. Maintaining your brand
The desire to do something different or new shouldn’t mean wiping the slate clean. Refreshing your website should be looked at as an opportunity to reinvigorate your brand, to put the energy and momentum back into it. Don’t change your typefaces and colours just for the sake of it, the desire to see something different from an internal point of view will merely dilute your brand in the eyes of your customers.
Look for ideas that can compliment, extend or enhance your brand. A new style of imagery that picks up your corporate colourways for example. Or a testimonials widget that picks out your logotype. Subtle pointers will strengthen your brand identity as a whole and reduce things like over-dependence on a logo.
8. Don’t be too precious
With any project that you invest a good deal of time and effort in it can be hard sometimes to let things go or make a change. Try to keep a clear perspective and remember these are improvements. It may have taken a long time to get a technical section working but if it contributes nothing to the site it might be serving visitors better another way.
Making your house into a home takes time. With constant improvements to update things in order to keep pace with the changes in your business and custom. A website can be viewed in a similar way, as a constant work in progress. Little enhancements, regularly along the way to keep everything up to date and save a lot of money on a major re-build project. Until you decide to move to a bigger house!
If you’re planning a website re-design, or you feel it’s time your design or content had a refresh, please get in touch.
