Before you write your website redesign proposal, I imagine you have overcome the question, “when is it a good time to redesign my company’s website?” If not, let me take you on a quick tangent.
The short answer, generally speaking, is every 2-3 years is a good time to consider a website redesign depending on the industry you are in; technology and market-forces change so, your business needs to adapt.
However, to me, the question isn’t so much “when is it a good time to redesign my company’s website?” but rather, “why do I want to redesign my company’s website?” The response to this question really determines whether a redesign is necessary. Perhaps your company is expanding? Offering a new product or service? Refining your brand?
Ultimately, the response I look for to this question is that your company wants to grow and it is looking to the web as a channel for growth – there are over 3 Billion searches online per day, why wouldn’t your business put more attention to your website strategy?
Before You Write a Website Redesign Proposal – Consider The Following
When creating a website redesign proposal, it is critical to consider the following 10 points before you even create a draft:
1. Document Current Website Stats
It is important to benchmark the current metrics of your website to be able to measure your new strategy against. This is assuming you already have an analytics tool; if you don’t, it is absolutely imperative that you install one! Be sure to capture metrics like page views, unique visitors, visits, sales leads generated.
2. Goals
Your website is a marketing channel. Like every other marketing channel in your strategy, you must define a goal so that you can create a plan to achieve those goals and support your company’s growth or marketing strategy. For example, perhaps you want a certain number of newsletter sign-ups; downloads for specific content. This forces you to keep your site dynamic rather than creating it and letting it settle with no purpose. You could even identify these goals in the website redesign proposal.
3. Traffic Sources
If you can identify which channels are driving traffic to your company’s website and which aren’t, you can re-allocate budget and resources to improving and/or leveraging those channels. Consider what social media is doing for you? Search Marketing: organic vs paid? Event marketing: are site visits increasing after you exhibit at tradeshows? These answers will identify where to put your marketing dollars.
4. Analyze the Competition
Never get distracted by your competitors but always know what they are “up-to”. Identify what you like or don’t like on their website; this will help you determine what you can do better. In your website redesign proposal, you could identify these competitors as a point of reference for any functionality and design inspiration.
5. Value proposition
The success of your marketing strategy hinges on how clear your value proposition is to your target market; including your website. Your value proposition is not a mission statement or an about-us statement or a list of features. It is a statement that describes the value your business is creating for your target market. This should be up front and centre in your website redesign proposal because it will give the web development company a clear direction of your business and allow them to translate it into a website design vision.
6. Website Design
The design of your website should always be catered towards your target market(s). The TM’s should already be defined in your overall marketing strategy; if not, this is critical. When they are defined, you will understand what imagery resonates with them; colours; content. Any reference in your website redesign proposal of creative concepts or ideas is always helpful as it provides some depiction of your own creative ideas.
7. Design for Mobile
With the popularity of mobile devices increasing (i.e. tablets, smartphones), your company’s website should be viewable on these devices, no matter what size. Otherwise, you risk losing a site visitor because you’ve frustrated them by not making it easy for them to read and view your content.
8. Optimize for Search
Organic search and paid search are becoming important tools in the marketing toolbox. Optimizing your website for search starts with a keyword strategy. A keyword strategy is driven by understanding your target market – how are they searching for your product or service? Long-tail search? Questions? Words? Get this right and you’ll see your site visitor metrics go through the roof!
9. Call to Action
No marketing vehicle is successful without an outstanding call-to-action, including web. What is it that you want the site visitor to do when they arrive at your website? Download something? Purchase something? Call someone? There are many generic CTA’s that you can include but there can also be specific CTA’s based on your business and industry. If you understand your target market, you will be able to create a CTA that attracts them.
10. Ongoing Content Strategy
The last thing you want to do is spend all this time and money to build a website, launch it with all this hype and then ignore it for another 3 years. An ongoing content strategy is imperative to keep your website fresh and to illustrate to site visitors this company is active and alive! It is important to identify in the website redesign proposal whether or not you require the web development company to carry-on work after the website is launched, it will give you a better understanding of ongoing costs.
A website redesign proposal does not have to be to lengthy, it just has to be descriptive and clear. The more time you dedicate towards planning a redesign, the less chance there is for cost-overruns, delays and misunderstandings.