There are too many changes that took place in the recent time over the web. An array of technologies and apps, tools, mobile advancement and transformation and emergence of social media platforms gave rise to an altogether different web and web based activities. Obviously, while many businesses continued to follow these trends and kept themselves tuned with the emerging trends and demands there are others who lagged behind and looked obsolete in regard to the latest web interface and technology. While the business websites keeping their web presence up to date with the latest technologies and trends continued to gain in traffic and business conversion, those who fell behind with obsolete web interface suffered from steadily reducing traffic and decreasing business conversion.
There are too many websites that lack good design, navigation elements, mobile optimization, readability, speed and performance, social media integration and many other quality attributes. Redesigning is the solution to take these websites to an at par level with modern websites with latest web design and development attributes. Let us introduce here 5 key considerations in redesigning a website.
1) Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design
The shift from desktop to mobile devices has changed the way we consume and use web. The change has been multi dimensional corresponding to device specific design, device specific functionality, loading speed and performance and ease of access and navigation. On the go internet browsing has added more spice to the internet based services than ever before and now every website in their design, technology and accessibility has to incorporate aspects that make a website truly mobile friendly.
-
Seamless functional output across diverse devices is a necessity for websites now.
-
The web pages must fit to different screen sizes of mobile devices and desktops without sacrificing readability or content usability.
-
Google in their latest search algorithm update made their preference clear for mobile friendly websites in search ranks.
-
Responsive design that offers responsively compatible website design for variety of devices to fit in became the major trend winning users and search engine ranks both.
-
Users accessing web through mobile have less patience and so designing the site to assure faster loading speed became important.
-
Mobile optimized and responsive design made way for simple and easy to find navigation menu.
-
Clutter free design with lot of white space around navigation buttons and content became the trend thanks to mobile optimized design. As mobile screens are smaller, avoiding clutter on web page became too important for drawing attention.
-
Building diverse landing pages according to the device in use became more successful for generating leads than a static one.
-
Finally it is the aesthetics, symmetry and organization that will impress any users whatever be the device he is using to access your website and this impression will directly result in good traffic and search engine results.
-
Good navigation, optimum multi device capability and enhanced accessibility will engage users more and let them do more actions. This would obviously result in higher business conversion for businesses.
2) Content Optimization
In spite of so much of renewed focus on design, development and navigation in the mobile era, content still remains the biggest contributing factor to drive traffic to a website and gain search engine ranks. At the end of the day content is the substance of your website around which all other activities flourish. Offering credible and relevant content should be the foremost priority of any website. All other design and development excellence are rendered meaningless for the visitor if he cannot find the content he was searching for.
-
Unique, relevant, informative and credible content still makes lot of differences in search results.
-
Content should be structured for faster readability across variety of devices with appropriate use of small paragraph, bullet points, sections, sub heads.
-
Design aspects like use of negative space around content, appropriate font size, color hierarchy, etc. should optimize content readability.
-
Contextual content as per the on-page user activities is another trend that paved the way to more user engagement.
3) Social Media and Social Login Integration
A website redesign initiative must address social media page setup and integration in an effective way. Social media presence in your website will offer higher reach to potential customers and chances of engaging them with your business in numerous ways. Any modern website is unthinkable without social media sharing and comment option or social media links.
-
‘Share’ and ‘like’ buttons and graphics let the visitor spread the content in their circles and thus let more traffic come in and engage with the site content.
-
Incorporating social logins into your website will allow users to come to the desired web page without going through lengthy registration process. This would increase the page footprints and overall traffic mobilization.
-
Social login will also facilitate more individualized user experience.
-
Social login will be helpful in reducing failed login attempts.
-
Social login will also offer spam protection and analytical user data for further lead generation.
4) Speed and Performance Optimization
In an era dominated by mobile web, you cannot expect people to tolerate a slow loading page that takes more than 10 seconds to load. Close to 40% of visitors never return to a website they consider slow in loading speed. So, another major aspect that you have to address in redesigning and reshaping your website to the modern standard is the speed and performance.
-
Design is very crucial to assure optimum page loading speed for your website. Optimizing every element and web files for faster loading is absolutely crucial.
-
Checking speed and performance on a variety of devices to minimize device specific loading issues is important at a time when every website is catered to an array of devices.
-
Make sure the website has appropriate bandwidth limit, storage space and quality hosting service.
-
For media rich dynamic website testing the site performance for preventing crashes and performance issues is crucial.
5) Website Analytics
A modern website for its variety of design attributes and rich interfaces needs to track performance issues from time to time. Web analytic tools offer data about the performance of website and let you know the potential areas that you need to address. When redesigning your website you have to make use of web analytic tools for assuring continuous performance and an optimization. A web analytic analyses variety of things and offers solutions for fulfilling the objectives from your website.
-
Web analytic tools can help you identifying the non performing website areas for fulfilling a variety of site specific objectives like selling products or services, lead generation, enhancing website traffic, creating brand awareness, etc.
-
Analyzing the user behavior and web traffic is the main task of web analytic. Such analysis helps targeting users and web traffic.
The Final Thoughts
The above mentioned areas offer a clear idea of what aspects you need to optimize in your website when redesigning it with a modern standard. For implementing these things obviously you need to work closely with your designers. A deeper understanding of Google’s search algorithm will be helpful as well.
Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing iPhone app development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lures him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.