Rethinking the website redesign

Thinking of redesigning your website? While it’s tempting to throw out the old design in favor of an exciting, fresh concept, it may not be a smart business decision.
If you work in web design, you’ve probably been approached by the small or medium business owner looking to redesign a website. (Is it just me, or do you also hear a large proportion, particularly in the technology sphere, say they want to redesign their sites to look more like Apple’s?)
Aside from the fact that your business is not Apple, there are plenty of reasons why you may want to think in baby steps rather than giant leaps when it comes to redesigning one of your company’s biggest assets.

What’s wrong with your website, exactly?

Before launching into a redesign, you’d better know why you’re doing it. “Because I’m tired of the look” doesn’t qualify.
If you want to change the look of your website because it isn’t bringing in the business you thought it would, a redesign is likely not the answer. You’ll be better off rethinking your online marketing strategy. (I know, it’s just that getting a new website design is so much more fun than all that hard thinking, right?)
A good designer might help you figure out why your site isn’t bringing in enough leads or sales, but you should be looking beyond design, too.
The changes you make on your site should correspond to the strategy you take for building your business, so think first about what you want to happen. More traffic? More media coverage to build exposure and inbound links? More interaction on your blog? More pass-alongs and downloads of your white papers? More direct contacts? Then think how a new design would address those goals. Most likely you don’t need a full redesign.

So, your site definitely needs an updated look. Why not go for a complete overhaul?

To avoid alienating existing customers
Picture this. A friend, customer, nephew, whoever, wants to recommend your services to a colleague. He pulls up your site at their next lunch meeting, prepared to show some pages on your site that he thinks will be useful. Oops, where did those pages go? Hey, this doesn’t even look like the site I knew… and so on.
To retain any built-up brand identity
Perhaps you aren’t getting as much business as you’d like from your site. Still, from the time your website was first published, it started to build brand equity. Those colors became associated with your brand, the overall style spoke of the personality of your company. The people who did come across the site came to know you as that site. Perhaps some of those people are still in the sales funnel.
So, don’t go from a red and black color scheme to pale blue. You can update color schemes without completely changing your colors. If you want a lighter feel, a good graphic designer can help you build it in while keeping your basic colors.
To see improvements more quickly
A full website overhaul takes a long time. It makes more sense to start with those things that you know will make the greatest impact. Perhaps stage one of your redesign would involve updating the layout to give more prominence to your email list signup and more accessible resources for prospects, the media and bloggers in your industry. Perhaps you design targeted landing pages that don’t carry all the distractions found on your existing internal pages, for example.
To measure the effect of your changes
If you completely redesign your site and your sales or leads remain the same, you’ve made no progress. And worse, you won’t know why. Implement changes bit by bit, and you may be able to see which changes are responsible for a big impact jump in performance and those that do nothing to help you meet your business goals.

When a complete redesign is appropriate

I’m not saying it’s never a good idea to completely redesign your website. If the focus of your business has changed, it certainly makes sense to overhaul your website to match it. If your site wasn’t professionally designed in the first place, you’d do well to get it up to par, even if that means starting from scratch. And sometimes moving to a new platform, such as WordPress, means you’ll have to change some things up anyway.
But for the most part, small businesses would do well to redesign for their business goals, changing things bit by bit. And for Pete’s sake, don’t aim to look like Apple—get your own personality.