Businesses change all the time. The purpose you have now is different from the one you started with. and suddenly you realize that you’re attracting different people compared to when you started.The same change applies to your business website too. It might not represent your business as well as it once did. The information and design are outdated. The solution? Get a website redesign and properly show off your business as it is today.
Consider the learn à build à measure approach before starting a redesign. Here’s why:
It will save you time: If you have ever experienced a website redesign, it’s a lot of work! Consider incrementally updating your website. This will produce quicker learnings without waiting weeks or even months building something from scratch.
It will save you money: Redesigns can be spendy. You may need new graphics or imagery, new technology or even a new logo. These things may be outside your expertise and require you to pay for skilled help.
By following the next 3 steps, you should be able to drill into your website pain points and potentially avoid a total redesign.
Step 1: Recognize the ProblemThe first step to incremental learnings is to understand the problem. You may already have theories on what’s not working – great, test those out! Not sure? Start categorizing calls you receive or investigate your website analytics for trends. Once you have a clear problem statement, make an educated guess or hypothesis you can test.
Step 2: Design & Setup Choose a hypothesis that is a priority for you and alter just that one item. By updating just one page or one element on a page, you can reduce the time and money you spend to validate the hypothesis.
Step 3: Measure & LearnOne of the most important steps to this process is metrics. It doesn’t have to be super accurate. It could be a week worth of tallies on what types of calls you are getting. If you wanted to iterate a few times before you put something live on the site, consider doing a usability test. Ask a few people ho are unfamiliar with the website if they can complete a simple task. If more than one person can’t complete the task you may need to fix the design before making the changes on the website.
Take your learnings and continue to update and optimize. With this approach you would have deliberately collected data points, making you better informed. Don’t pay for a big redesign, incrementally work your way to a better website.