The Main Reasons Your Web Site Needs Re-Design

The reason, to redesign your website, is to impact your business, not because you are bored with the design or because you want to change the colors.

The results from a redesign should be: increasing visitors, leads and customers.

Every decision you make should be focused on improving those goals. Forget about the shade of blue or if the colors match your old site, exactly. You need to focus on what your SEO professional tells you needs to be done. They have the experience (if you have chosen wisely) to know what will help you to improve your visitor rate.

There are thousands of ways that a website redesign can actually negatively impact your results. In fact, most of the time, website redesigns do have a negative impact on marketing results because they are done by the same people that originally designed the ineffective site, either the site owner or a web designer that works cheaply.

Sometimes an overhaul will be done unneccarily, by an unscrupulous web "geek" that is just hungry to suck in an unsuspecting business owner and design a site that makes the owner need the designer forever. (use of scripting, strange coding, witholding site info, propietary software, etc.) Most of the time, these site "redesigns" end in a bankrupt business owner...after the "consultant" has sucked them dry!

Hopefully, your existing website has a lot of positives that you have built upon to make your site recognizable and trusted. These assets help your prospects find your website and help you turn them into leads and customers. You need to pinpoint what those assets are (great content, keywords you rank for, inbound links to individual pages, conversion tools) and protect them carefully during the redesign. However, don't get caught up in an ego party and refuse to let go of something just because you like it. (Many "web design experts" don't know what they are doing. They know pretty colors, but they are design experts not Internet marketing experts. We are both.)

You don't need to have a 100% unique design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one or two designs that you can use as examples, for your redesign. Most visitors, and the search engines, care about the content more than the design. The design should be good, but that does not mean unique and complicated.Try to stay away from "cookie cutter" template sites, or sites with too much "flash".

If you have more content, on average, you will have more website visitors and grow your business faster. A 100-page website will beat a 10 page website 90% of the time. And a 500-page website is even better. And if some of those web pages were written recently, that's even better. So, build a strategy to continue to add more and more content to your website over time. (I don't recommend blogs, they usually attract the kind of content that you don't want)

The key to driving your conversion rate and the number of leads that you get, from your website, is to constantly improve the effectiveness of your landing pages. You should be in the process of creating new content constantly. The more often you add content, the more often the search engines index your pages.

With the search engines following Google's lead and new searches, like Bing, coming out almost daily, you cannot spend all your time, keeping up with all the Internet changes. You need someone, to advise you, that spends all THEIR time keeping up with these changes. Landing pages are critical to actually get value out of your traffic. And SEO, by a true expert, is not as expensive as the lost sales of not SEOing your pages.

Dynamic pages are really out, they have no trust factor at all, to the searches. Old Sites need to be redesigned, because XHTML is the industry standard, now.

If a visitor comes to your site, and it looks old and unused, they are going to go on, with their shopping, to find a site that looks prosperous.

After all, would you trust your personal information to someone that was dressed in old tattered clothes?