I get asked to do a lot of re-designs, and the one thing I see a lot of is sites that just don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t load, or have a lot of broken links… I mean they don’t do what they were intended to do, and that is sell! Whether a business is selling a product or service, the web site needs to sell in order to really work.
Ask yourself this… If your website was a sales person for your company, would he be worth his salary (i.e web expenses)? If not, then your site doesn’t work!
When looking at a re-design, theres two things you need to look at. You need to look at your competition’s sites, and you need to look at what you want to promote the most. Looking at your competition is actually pretty simple thanks to compete.com, and it can tell you a lot about what people are looking for, where they’re coming from, and how many people are looking. It’s data that can help you get a better grasp of what your site needs in order to compete.
After that, you need to determine what you need to promote the most. It usually is the product that has the highest profit, but it could be anything really. You just need that core group of products that the re-design surrounds. And those products are going to be the biggest part of your site design, how the site is positioned when it comes to search engines, and where you put your promotional dollars.
The biggest mistake people make is they spend a ton promoting the business, and not the product. It should be the opposite. A good product with competitive pricing will promote any business better than anything.
Sadly, 90% of re-designs are just wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. Not just with code and images, but a new idea that the web site should actually work… and not just look pretty!