This week, Impact Networking launched a brand-new website that’s been in the works since early January this year. From inception to launch, it was at least a 7-month project, and we learned a lot along the way. Now that we’ve launched our beautiful new site, we want to pass on some of the hard learned lessons we picked up to you in this website redesign case study.
Websites play a critical role in the modern and digital world for brands of all sizes. Your website acts as a central hub for your users and audience members, facilitates conversions, boosts brand awareness and recognition, and allows you to connect and engage with your audience. Not only that, but your website can also act as your main publishing platform for all of your organization’s stellar content.
As you can see, a website isn’t just a website; it’s an extension of your brand, an ecosystem of various communication channels, and a way for you to tell the globe what makes your brand so unique and special.
“Search engines are key drivers of traffic and e-commerce. 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search, and 49% of users say they use Google to discover a new product.”
Strong marketing is creative, edgy, and makes an impression. If you want more advice on crafting a highly-effective marketing campaign, check out Impact’s Attract, Engage, Stand Out – Building Effective Marketing Campaigns Webinar.
Preparing for a Website Redesign
Many organizations already have a website, which is a great start. However, having a website doesn't’ mean that it’s effective, easy to use, optimized, or engaging – and that’s often where website redesigns are focused.
This starts to hint at the importance of preparation before diving into a site redesign. Taking the time to properly prepare for your brands website redesign will help you answer critical questions about the nature, scope, and purpose of the redesign itself.
Using the Impact website redesign as a case study, for instance, we can break down the preparation phase into three distinct stages which we explore below; research, goal-setting, and ideation.
The Research
The very first stage in any website redesign project is research. In fact, there are three core components of the pre-project research that need conducting. The first is internal, the second is competitor, and the third is the market component.
Internal research is all about understanding your current digital presence as it stands today. This means conducting an internal content audit on your blogs, company videos, newsletters, press releases, and other content assets your brand uses regularly to connect and engage with your audience.
On top of archiving and organizing all of your existing content, you should also use this audit as a chance to flag blogs that could use an SEO or intent-based update and to find space for new content as well.
Competitor research involves looking externally at other brands in the same industry or marketplace as yours. Not only can you borrow strategies, and see what’s working for your competitors, but you can also gather an understanding about what isn’t working. Taking insights from your competition can point you in the right direction in designing a smooth and high-performing website.
Finally, the third research component is based on the market. This could mean conducting customer surveys, sending out feedback request emails, or any number of other tactics that give your direct audience a chance to tell you what it is they want and need.
Using these findings, your brand can start puzzling together what it is they want the new website to be. After going through these stages for our own site redesign, the team at Impact is more than capable of helping you answer these tough questions too.
Establishing Goals
After collating all the findings that came from the pre-project research, you’ll have an idea of the direction that you want the new website to take with the redesign. You’ll understand which pieces of content are performing historically well and where there’s room to improve your content strategy. On top of that, you should have a grasp on your competitions positioning, and the market expectations.
These findings are going to inform your redesign goals and provide you with actual metrics to track. Because websites have such a strong conversion potential, this is often a main goal driving redesign efforts.
However, there are other more nuanced goals that modern organizations should consider when ramping up for a website redesign.
Beyond the fairly obvious; increased traffic and a higher conversion rate, a site redesign project can aim to improve the customer experience through an evolved user-interface design. Providing a better experience for users on your website will passively reduce bounce rate, increase conversions, and improve the overall brand reputation.
You can also include better site optimization (faster loading speeds and more mobile friendly), stronger brand recognition, and more focused SEO as goals for your comprehensive website redesign. With the Impact website redesign, we focused on site speeds, aesthetic, and the quality and depth of content, all with the ultimate goal of delivering an unmatched user experience on our site.
