10 Valid Reasons in Redesigning a Website

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There are various reasons why a designer and a web developer opt for a website redesign. Redesigning is important to maximize the website in its full potential and to achieve the capability and service to its satisfactory level. “Redesigning” does not confine into graphic modification alone. Instead it could include an overhaul of the site. However, redesigning could also mean an additional component and installation of basic functionalities that is needed for the site to smoothly slide along. Redesigning is also important in the SEO aspect, especially with the ever changing optimizations the major SEOs have.

The Page title. If you have a page title to the effect of ‘Index’ or ‘New Document’ or ‘Insert Title here’ or you deliberately forgot to have a META description tag and keywords—That’s mortal sin. It is very important for you to have META tags and keywords in your page title and should be present in all your pages. Your page title should always make sense to your readers then to the search engines. A page title should be self-explanatory and illustrative and should give the readers hint on what to expect on the site.

Examples: on the topic of “why XML is awesome!” notice the textual branding here.

Sample Title 1: 10 reasons why XML is awesome, online | your blog name here

Sample Title 2: Extensible Markup language: XML rules the web | your blog name here

Sample Title 3: How XML is changing the way the market connects | your blog name here

The above three title examples should reflect the META description and keywords for your website’s benefit and for the search engine too. While having a title like: I love XML | your blog name here should be avoided because you will miss a lot of important key phrases for a proper searching of your post and eventually your site.

Overlaying Graphics. This could be the most insignificant thing that you can do to your site. Overlaying graphics such as snow falling is not an excuse if you want your site to look awesome. Anything that would interrupt your readers from their purpose including those blasting music that goes on without a warning.

If you want your site to have that festive happy-go-lucky impression, try putting a party hat just above your logo. Stay away from those DTHML giveaway scripts which claims that would bring your site a life of its own. In fact those things would help you drive away SEO, readers and rankings away for good.

Cross Browsing Experience. You should run your website at least to the two of the most major browsers in the net world: Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, also for Safari and Firefox for Mac. It will be great if your site runs smoothly on these two top browsers. This is to ensure that most of the internet users will see your site without a problem. Cross browsing is important. However, Google Analytics will help you decide on what and where to target traffic.

Flash and Graphics. Flash may be an eye candy but it is not SEO friendly, meaning however fancy and dandy your flash presentation maybe, there would be a slim chance that visitors would see it in terms of search engine indexing. Unless you have an HTML version of flash, there would be little chance of your site to rank in the SEO’s landing page. Website in text written in an Image also has a slim chance of being indexed. Do not risk writing text on an image. Google doesn’t recognize and index it.

High Bounce Rate. Bounce rate is simply the process where visitors enter and leave your site through another site, and after viewing your site for quite a few moments, decides to leave. That kind of visit could be called ‘bounce.’ One of the deciding factors whether to consider a redesign is if you have a high bounce rate. Sometimes a simple tweaking such as moving around helps a lot but there are times it proves to be difficult especially if the website which is wrongly designed forbids it. You should also check other matters concerning your bounce rate.

Hard to find contents. One of the biggest problems of a website is content not being easy to find. Search your own site to see if things work out well. Your site should have a search bar on it, work on it and see if it works. Proper website structuring will help a lot of readers find what they are looking for in your site. Heed your readers’ comments especially if they find it hard to look for something in your site. If they would spend a lot of mouse clicking before they finally arrive in the page that they want, maybe there’s a problem lying somewhere-go and check it out.

Website with frames. This is so Jurassic, and it isn’t funny. By any means avoid using frames for your website, unless it’s a matter of life and death situation-which I think it isn’t. We have overlays and DIVs you can utilize these days. Google has it that if you are going to utilize a frame on your website for reasons known only to you, use the “no Frames” tag to provide alternate content.

Bad Navigation. This is a common turn off among the visitors. This can make or break a site, because nobody would dare make their life miserable by trying to stick to a site with bad navigation. It’s like trying to drive a car in a freeway running 20 kilometers per hour. Keep in mind the user’s interests while designing site navigation.

What might be of grave important to you is less significant to your visitors. If you think you have done a great job in designing your ‘about’ page-think again. People come to a site not because of the ‘about’ page but because they are looking for something and they want to find it as soon as they can. Go on and provide it to them instead of soothing yourself spending time to things less important to your visitors.

Spend some time testing your site, like surveying, asking questions, and reaching out to what they think of your site’s navigation. You will be surprised to find out the things that you really didn’t notice in the first place but are obvious to others.

Half-dead site. Your website is supposed to be the primary mover of your business. It should act as a leading edge, an online store that is available 24/7. If you noticed that your website isn’t what it is supposed to be, or performing way below your expectation, it’s time to do some tweaking.

There are various internet tools. Google has a lot of it that could measure your website’s performance. These metrics will tell you factual the areas on which you should consider overhauling. If you think your site needs redesigning to ‘freshen’ up things a little bit, go ahead and do it.

Always keep in mind the four words that end up in “ability” to guide you through the proper way of having a sound looking and great performing website, they are as follows:

1. Usability
2. Visibility
3. Accessibility
4. Findability

These and more are the things you should consider while contemplating on redesigning your website. Although redesigning will cost a lot of your time and effort not to mention money, it is worth all the fuss if the influx of traffic is in your website’s doorstep.