You finally took the plunge and decided to re-design your website. Whether you’re redesigning it because it isn’t mobile responsive, or you simply just had an outdated website – bottom line is you needed to make this leap.
Now comes the common questions: When do I know if it is complete or not? Did I include everything I should? Does my website sell my product effectively?
You don’t have to feel overwhelmed when it is time to transfer your development site into a live environment that users can view and the search engines can index. Always stick to your bottom line – does your website spell out what is unique about your company and reveal your brand’s selling proposition immediately? If not, you may need to work on the design a little bit more to ensure it is influencing your audience through the correct messaging.
What You Need to Know Before Launching Your New Design
Stop Focusing on Little Content Tweaks and Focus on Your Overall Message
It can be daunting to go over every single piece of content on your website, especially if you have a larger site. The good news is, minor content errors can be fixed after it goes live. Instead of worrying about minor content errors, focus on understanding the goal of each page. Does each page represent something crucial to your business and is it sticking to your brand messaging? If your website clearly defines what you do, how your business is unique, and where to go to purchase – you’ve got your most important bases covered.
Don’t Let Your Website Design Take 6 Months to Accomplish
We see this all of the time. Companies will take months to complete a simple re-design that should’ve taken 30 days. There can be a number of reasons why this happens, however, business owners need to think of the bigger picture at stake. The longer you take to push your website design live, the longer it’s going to take to gain any return on investment from the new design. You can keep running the marketing campaign to prevent any huge losses, but you need that new design in order for your updated marketing strategy to be successful.
Your Website is a Constant Work in Progress
Most website design agencies will utilize modern design principles when designing your website. However, a lot more goes into a design than “pretty” graphics. It’s more about the psychological aspect of how users are navigating through your site. How do users feel when they land on a web page? Your website is a constant testing ground for conversion since you won’t know how users navigate your new website design until it’s actually live. Look closely at the conversion funnels in your Google Analytics to identify where you’re losing users. Re-designing, re-writing and re-optimizing internal pages of the site may be a constant work in progress until you’ve reached a conversion rate you’re happy with.
Forward Thinking is a Must
Content development and site architecture can be a large piece to a website design. You have to think about now, and the future, when developing the site architecture and content. Make sure your voice is consistent, your site architecture is easily expandable, and your content all leads to one main conversion goal. You also need to be forward thinking, so that all of your other marketing collateral and strategies align and meet your short and longer term goals.
How to Know If Your Website Design Is Ready to Go Live
Don’t let all of the little things get you off track. The real goal of the website design is to show off your product or service and show why your brand should be chosen. When your content messaging clearly defines your product or service when you hit the site – your content is ready to go.
What about everything else? To know if your website is good to go, it must be thoroughly tested for quality assurance.
What to Test Before Launching Your New Design:
- Test all contact forms to ensure emails are being received.
- Test the shopping cart to ensure products can be easily purchased without any glitches.
- Manually click each page on throughout the navigation to ensure it is pulling up properly.
- Manually click all links on the site to make sure none are broken.
- Make sure all of your images and videos are properly sized to prevent slow loading times.
- Check everything on mobile separately to ensure a quality mobile experience.
- Make sure all of your pages are properly siloed in the navigation, meaning the URL coincides with the parent category.
- Install all of your necessary plugins for SEO and social media.
- Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console on the new site.
- Install any other tracking metrics, such as Call Tracking Metrics.
These are just some basic things to look for before pushing your site live. For a full list, check out our website checklist.
Closing Thoughts
Always go into a new design project with a plan and forward thinking. The whole point of re-designing, or designing a new site from scratch, is to show off what’s unique about your business. Be prepared to explain your unique selling proposition to your web designer, so that they can understand your vision. From there, your website design agency should be able to take your vision and turn it into a beautiful, modern design that is also practical for your on-going marketing strategy.
Looking for custom website creation services that can increase your website traffic and conversions? Call our website design specialists today: 1.800.871.4130
Everything is very open with a precise explanation of the issues.
It was truly informative. Your website is very useful. Many thanks for sharing!
It is really very important that you test everything with your website before you launch it. Make sure that your pages are doing well and you have the information that are needed to be found there. This way, you will know that you are starting it right.