How To Create A Perfect Website Redesign Project Plan For Your Client
Redesigning a website isn’t easy, and it’s a complicated process. There are lots of reasons that you may be considering to do it: If you want to attract more traffic to a website and generate more leads, highlight contents or change your goals for solutions, you might consider a website redesign. A well-organized website redesign project plan will save you from this daunting task.
According to Standford University, 75% of people judge the credibility of a business based on the design of its website. A perfect website redesign project plan is the key that will carry you and your clients to success.
Difficult to navigate or unpractical website designs can negatively affect your client’s search ranking. You need to leave the out-dated website behind and look for ways to create the best brand authority with an easy to navigate, engaging experience for browsers.
Maybe your client’s website hasn’t enough functionality or flexibility to meet today’s web design standards. If your client’s website is older than 4 years, redesigning with the latest technology should be considered to keep it up-to-date. In addition, it is dependent on time and money.
Keep in mind, the redesign doesn’t mean re-branding. A website redesign project plan involves many items. As a project manager, it’s important not to miss anything.
You need to make your planning ahead of time if you want this project to be successful. Setting parameters for this project and defining desired outcomes will be your next step.
This guide will help you to construct a perfect website redesign project plan for your client:
Analyze the existing website and define your goals
Before you start a project, you should analyze the current website and focus on the goals of the organization. How the current site is performing? Which areas need improvement? You can check the average number of website visits and leads per month, monthly bounce rate, monthly time spent on the website, top performing keywords by traffic and lead generation, the total number of inbound links by domain and sales per month, etc.
After you’ve identified what metrics to focus on in your website redesign project plan, start crafting a website that meets your goals. Your main aim should be adding value to the business. You should also keep an eye on the competitors and their performance.
By using SEMrush, Expona, Screamingfrog or similar tools you can analyze your client’s website and compare it to its competitors.
Business and marketing goals can be
- Increasing sales
- Earning new 100 customers
- Generating 50 backlinks each month
- Reducing customer service requests
- Increasing leads generated by the website
- Decreasing bounce rate or improving the average time spent on the website
Pick the right stakeholders for your project team
In order to keep the process focused, you need to have a team of stakeholders who shares the same values and goals are relevant to the project. We advise you to keep your core team fewer than 6 people from different departments and different skill sets.
It will make the decision-making process easy. You can build a team of a creative, UX & UI designer, content manager, and few executives. If you don’t want to fall behind the schedule, try to convince executives to attend business-critical meetings.
A West Coast brand and digital experience agency RNO1 helped Opus9 launch their MVP web app experience to be minimalist and memorable across all modern devices. Aligned with the Leadership, Technology and Product Team for this well-funded SaaS Startup, they created a successful brand and digital strategy.
You can visit RNO1’s website to learn more about the project.
Review your existing content
Content is still king and the biggest contributor to your search engine ranking. Your website redesign project plan needs to include taking inventory of the existing content.
Check the most traffic generated current pages, redesigned web pages, inbound links, your most searched keywords, primary function of your website and decide whether this piece of content will add value to your redesigned website. Then you can decide whether save it or scrape it.
Try to transfer premium, highly desirable content in your redesigned website and scrap the outdated, poorly written ones. Content is one of your most valuable assets and it’s a path to connect you with your customers. If you want to have search engine supremacy, you need to pay attention to content quality.
Optimize your site for mapping
The attention span for visitors is limited to 5-7 seconds. In this very little time, they decide to explore or leave your website. So you need a straightforward and informative site to provide a good user experience. Your website can have eye-catching visuals, and compelling content to attract people but visitors need a sitemap to understand where to go next.
A site map shows how visitors move through your website and creates a relationship between pages and components of your site. Google takes this information and forms an opinion about how each element of your website works. Make your call to action and navigation buttons visible, order sub-pages clearly and bring clarity to every corner of your website.
Vancouver-based branding and experience design agency Massive Media has delivered a great project for their client Team Clarke. Prioritizing the user’s needs and featuring a custom-built map search, the new site is redesigned to attract home buyers from across the world with its stunning scenery and inspiring content. The result looks like a flexible and comprehensive brand that was implemented across every physical and digital touch-point in a client’s customer journey.
Read the full story about Massive Media’s latest work.
Take user experience as a priority
You can keep your visitors longer on your website with the great user experience. If you engage them, they’ll want to explore more. Smooth navigation, clear direction, inspiring content and alluring calls to action, you can increase your conversion rates. Remember, the longer they stay, they more likely to become leads. With a consistent appearance, inspiring imagery, personalized content and on-the-go logging option you can create an almost perfect user experience for your visitors.
Budgeting
Website redesign and development budgets vary to the client’s needs and goals. The pricing is basically time vs. cost like any other service-based business. When you’re creating pricing for your clients, anticipate their needs vs. the amount of time it will take you to execute it. You can perceive an execution time and determine an hourly rate. Here you can learn about e-commerce website redesign costs.
Whether you have small or big company undergoing a website redesign project is a difficult task. You need to establish clear goals and work with right partners. In fact, only 24% of the organizations truly love their redesigned website.
If you want to learn about website design process in details, have a look at this article as well.
