What Should You Focus On When Redesigning a Company Site?

Thinking about redesigning the company site? While updating your website is a good idea, it’s still risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can alienate your existing audience by going with a new web design that is disconnected from your roots. You can unknowingly get rid of website elements making your site work with less effective designs. The key is to know what to focus on to improve your company site.

For many companies, the idea of a redesign stems from a much-needed update to how their website looks. It might be attractive to revamp the entire website completely, but you must think about what’s working right now. What are people connecting to on your website right now? What aspects of the design reflect the brand of the company? What elements bring your website together to create a unique identity?

These questions are important because they all tie into the company brand. Much of the focus should be on transitioning the old brand into an updated version of the brand rather than ditching the old brand altogether. The only exception is if the brand doesn’t say anything or hasn’t been working out for the company. Try to figure out what works and how to update it to reflect the new desired image. Of course, the problems may not be the brand but just the website’s general design.

The next thing to focus on is the performance of the website. You cannot think about redesign without measuring the performance of your website. A redesigned website may look better, but it’s not uncommon for it to perform worse than the previous iteration of the website. That’s why you have to measure conversions, clickthroughs, and other metrics to determine if the redesign is successful. The challenge here is trying to come up with a redesign that is both aesthetically pleasing and statistically profitable.

Aside from the brand and performance of the website, you’ll have to go through the basic design thinking process which includes research, brainstorming, wireframing and the actual design. It is a worthwhile idea to redesign one aspect of your website at a time so that you can split-test its performance for consistency. Many websites have gone this route and seen great results without diminishing performance. With that said, you still want to have a greater vision of what you want your brand and site to be.

Finally, there’s not one big thing to focus on when redesigning your website. The web design should start with the brand because it is a company site. From there, the metrics should be measured to ensure that performance doesn’t decrease due to the site changes. You’ll find yourself constantly going back and forth until you develop a design that reflects your vision and performs up to previous standards or better if the previous incarnation was disappointing.