Evolution is a natural occurrence in the business world. Whether you call it a web redesign or web makeover, in order to remain competitive in an ever-expanding global market it’s important that your on-line image grow with you and available technology.
After all, perceived value is everything in a competitive market. On-line consumers have a highly discriminating eye and will be continually evaluating your website for new products and features. Therefore, a web redesign shows your customers that your business is moving forward and not remaining static. It’s a clear signal to potential and returning customers that your company is growing and sustainable.
The goal of a web redesign is to sustain current traffic (retention), stimulate new sales (conversion), and increase your bottom line (ROI). It’s interesting to note that over 58% of visitors who experience usability problems on a website do not return, while over 83% of visitors are likely to leave a website if they feel they have too many clicks to find what they're looking for. Therefore, a site redesign will solve any usability issues, directly affecting return traffic to your site.
Improvements of Web Redesign
- Improve Your Competitive Edge
- Expand Customer Base and Market Share
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Website Redesign Improves Your Competitive Edge
Your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) is the one thing your company can offer that your competitor’s cannot; it’s your competitive edge. A well-designed website can be your USP, setting you distinctly apart from your competitors.
Therefore, the first step in any web redesign is to evaluate your current position especially in relation to your competitors. It’s important to research industry wide customer criteria, using objective data, to help you feature your products in the best light. As well as, identify your top competitors and score their strengths and weakness in comparison to your own. This analysis helps us to determine your web design USP.
Another part of improving your competitive edge is the introduction of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is quite complex so we won’t go into a great deal of depth in this article. However, you can read more by clicking here: Your Website and SEO.
It’s important to realize that your website isn’t simply a showcase of products; it is a competitive tool. By defining and exploiting your USP and implementing SEO we can capture potential customers and ensure their loyalty.
Redesigning Your Website Can Expand Customer Base and Market Share
Once your customer criteria and USP have been defined, a web redesign plans how to attract and more importantly retain and convert website visitors to loyal customers.
The usability of websites is becoming a very important topic as organizations struggle to reach, and especially to retain, a wider audience. It’s important that websites provide clear and consistent navigation, be device independent, consist of clear and understandable content, and offers text alternatives to images and links. Redesigning your website is an excellent opportunity to address these issues. After all, a website well designed is accessible to all your potential customers.
In addition, a well-designed website is search engine friendly. For many, the internet is a resource discovery tool. By using structured semantic code and content, you give your company an online edge by making it appealing to search bots and ultimately customer queries.
Good design attracts customers quickly; a website well designed creates recommendations and referrals. Web Redesign provides an excellent opportunity to make your website visitors part of your guerilla marketing network. Word of mouth, or text of email, remains one of the strongest ROI opportunities available.
Web Redesign Saves Time & Money
Another benefit of web redesign is cost-effectiveness. It’s common for business owners to focus on their websites as simply a selling tool offering their products and services on-line. However, good web design can actually save you time and money.
Not only does a website allow you to operate anywhere in the world without the overhead required by a bricks and mortar but a website can also automate tasks and procedures. For instance, you can take advantage of word of mouth opportunities by providing referral tools to customers.
You can also automate certain customer response tools. Moreover, a good web redesign will evaluate past customer comments and queries to help redefine issues and aspects of your current design, increasing customer usability and satisfaction.
Utilizing automated features through software applications on your website saves you hours of manual labor and employee costs. Instead of having 10 people organizing a mailing to your subscriber list, you can use a software program that can handle the scheduling and distribution through the efforts of one person.
Website Redesigns Improve Retention
Seventy-five percent of users admit to making judgments about company's credibility based on their website's design. Ergo, anything you do to increase your credibility will positively influence your visitor’s perception. Positive perception creates customer retention.
A redesign of your website offers an amazing opportunity to become customer-centric. Incremental improvements can have dramatic results. After all, the quality of the customer experience is the real driver of retention and financial success. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to improve perception, to improve the customer relationship.
Website Redesigns Improve Conversion
The goal of retention is conversion, which is turning the casual website visitor into a returning customer. Investing in an improved conversion rate yields a higher ROI over a longer period than investing in simple traffic increase.
Accessibility and usability are two key issues addressed in a web redesign. Through cross-referencing and visual integrity, website design increases the value to your customers creating a positive experience and ensuring their loyalty.
Website Redesigns Improve Return on Investment (ROI)
Web sites must generate revenue and real results. Typically, a website has one of the greatest ROI opportunities. Unlike traditional media outlets, it's taken the Internet only 5 years to reach 50 million users, compared to cable (10), TV (13), and radio (38).
Web redesign is more than making your site look good. Web design and development is powerful strategic weapon that enhances financial returns and creates competitive advantage. A 2008 survey conducted by Alertbox determined that a redesign for usability on average improved the key performance indicators (KPI) by 83%.
Redesigning your website allows you to focus on creating a tool that adds value, performance, ease of use and other customer criteria, allowing you to become truly user-centric. Redesigning your website’s landing pages, home page, categories, detail pages, forms, and checkout procedures to be responsive to your users can explode your bottom line.
A web redesign is an affordable opportunity to build upon your current customer base and experience. It is an opportunity to capitalize your current investments. Ultimately, improving your website is improving your business.
