Did you know that the average lifespan of a website is just under 3 years, and if your website is competing in a highly competitive market, it could be even less! Having to constantly improve or renew your digital presence could cost your business if it's not well prepared and planned for.
When it comes to building a new website or revamping an existing one, there are a number of factors to consider: target audience, design, technology, SEO, mobile-friendliness, and more. If you’re looking to outsource all aspects of building a new website, the costs can add up. This can usually be spread across multiple digital marketing agencies (if one doesn’t cover all aspects of the site), which in turn can lead to an increase in the scope of work because projects aren’t properly defined, documented, or controlled.
So, instead of turning to partners in the initial phase, there is a lot you can do yourself to minimize potential costs, thoroughly prepare the project, and maximize results.
So, let's take a look at what you can do to increase the success of your web design projects from day one...
Prepare for your target audience
The initial stage when considering how often and why an organization should make digital changes should be done after studying your target audience and how that audience behaves on your digital platforms. A target audience is the group of visitors who are most likely to engage with your digital platforms, often through website promotions, products, and services. Audiences are typically based on location, age, income, etc.
This part of the project can be managed independently or prepared by conducting digital strategy workshops that review the current website audience and visitor behavior. By performing regular Google Analytics checks and installing heatmaps to review user behavior, many questions can be answered without the need to consult with external digital agencies.
By reviewing our clients’ Google Analytics data over the past few years and comparing the statistics to global trends, we’ve noticed that clients who haven’t focused on mobile design have suffered major setbacks. As you may already know, mobile visits have increased by an average of 140% and now account for 52% of total web users. This is just one of many metrics that can be considered during the initial workshop and planning of the digital project that follows.
Create SMART goals
After setting and understanding your target audience, it’s important to create SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, and time-bound) goals for building your new website. These goals morocco phone number data will later define the look and feel of your website and will be taken into account during the various stages. Here are some examples of SMART goals: increase organic traffic, reduce bounce rate, lead conversions, increase blog engagement, etc. Goals are specific to each organization and each digital platform.
Create sketches
By conducting a heatmap workshop, organizations can gather a wealth of information about how their users behave. You can use this information to create blueprints that will help designers for the upcoming design phase. This can show, for example, that users are less likely to scroll down pages, so it’s important to have a Call to Action (CTA) at the top or to follow the user as they navigate. This can potentially increase conversions.
When you analyze digital traffic with the help of the various tools mentioned, you will have a clear understanding of the way your users interact, so when external agencies give you a design, you can review it before the website goes live, which can potentially save unnecessary changes.
Use existing templates
Once goals have been set and sketches created during the initial workshop, the site development should begin. Templates are usually the first thing to consider in the development phase. These are pre-designed resources that show the layout structure and display features, often widgets or web parts, on any given website.
Templates don't necessarily need to be created every time a website needs a refresh, but can be reused or repurposed to change the look and feel with minimal effort. If they do need to be recreated, due to the introduction of new elements or technologies, it's a good idea to consider multiple usage scenarios for a single template, as web parts can be placed anywhere on the template. This is a great way to reduce the number of templates that need to be recreated and will help you get more out of your web design budget.
Reduce the total number of web pages
Creating and planning a large number of pages in the initial phase becomes a burden for developers, designers, content writers, and other team members. It is important to focus on what is actually needed for the renovation and development. Some clients decide to publish only the main pages that generate traffic, and leave the rest for the second phase. This saves everyone time and budget, but also reduces risk.
By adopting a growth-driven approach (GDD), tracking your initial launch and reviewing statistics, heat maps and user behavior, you will learn what your visitors are doing on your website. Once this is clear, it is easier to define how many pages and what content is needed, and whether the current page needs to be optimized. Additional pages can be created by downloading existing templates that, with users in mind, will save time and budget.
Prepare the content
During the development of a website, a lot of old content can be refreshed with minimal effort. As with technology, Google searches and keywords change based on what is currently effective and popular. If a lot of content is outdated, not much traffic will be generated to the website, which can affect the return on investment (ROI). Therefore, it is important to analyze the current traffic to the website to make sure that adequate content is being delivered. Also, review the pages that are losing traffic or are trending negatively and you should optimize them or even remove them completely. This is closely related to reducing the number of pages needed on the site.
Migrating content not only reduces potential costs to the agency that charges for that service, but also provides additional training on using the CMS and potentially spotting issues that can be resolved before the Go-Live process.
Keeping up with the digital project
What may initially seem like a simple website build/rebuild could be deceiving. There are multiple ways to build fast websites, but most organizations want to have customized websites, integrations with other tools, unique designs, optimized browser compatibility, SEO optimization , and potentially want to perform content migration. All of these require additional development time and will result in higher costs. A key thing that is often forgotten is what we call the “unknowns” during the development phase. These could be modifications to third-party integrations, changes in SEO best practices, updates to the chosen CMS platform, new technologies, etc.
What every organization should focus on is finalizing SMART goals, identifying what actually drives traffic, what generates ROI, to create a springboard that can be constantly optimized with minimal effort. This will allow longevity for the digital project that can be optimized, changed, and updated depending on the digital situation in the future.