It's essential to keep your website up to date, modern and representative of your brand - but you probably already knew that. Sometimes part of this "staying up to date" process means your website will need a re-design. 

A re-design provides an excellent opportunity to ensure your website style and content aligns perfectly with the desired portrayal of your brand. It allows for a refresh of any colours and fonts and gives way to improving site usability and performance. 

But, if you don't get the right website developer for the job, things can go wrong. Very wrong. 

One of the most significant issues in the marketing and web development industry is the sheer number of underqualified agency staff and freelancers there are out there. It's not uncommon for agencies to start out as print media agencies or videographers, for example, and then move on to website development and marketing despite them not being particularly well qualified to do so. Upon enquiring with a company about website design, be sure to ask about qualifications and experience. The best web developers usually have a heap of experience purely in their area of expertise and or a degree in computer engineering, web development or similar. If you're looking for a Lincolnshire based web developer, we recommend David at The Pattern Factory. 

So, just what exactly can go wrong? What should you look out for and what questions should you ask before commencing on a website re-design project? Let's talk about that!

SEO

Whether you've worked tirelessly on your SEO yourself, or you've dug out your wallet and paid a professional, you don't want a chunk of that work to become worthless after your re-design. 

Honestly, we always recommend speaking to a professional because although it's easy to learn about content, internal and external links and meta titles, technical SEO elements such as robots.txt, sitemaps and even indexing can be complicated. 

Before your re-design, get a professional to take a look through your site, so you know which SEO elements you want to "take with you". If your current URL's, page titles and tags are helping to rank well, you'll want to keep these intact. 

You can take a look yourself at your existing site SEO by using the free tool, Seoptimer. 

A common error following a website re-design is the lack of implementation of essential SEO elements (optimised URL's, page titles etc.) and other more in-depth SEO elements such as sitemaps. 

Before the redesign:

After the redesign:

A client of ours recently got a website re-design by another local company, and upon transferring the blog content, the company haven't copied over the formatting or the SEO elements we'd implemented into the blogs! This is a nightmare in itself, but the website is also missing many other SEO elements such as optimised page titles and meta descriptions (although these aren't a ranking factor). This website previously got an A for SEO when ran through Seoptimer; it now gets a mere C for its SEO efforts. 

There is a crucial lesson to be learned here; ask enough questions upon enquiry and where possible, work with a web developer who works alongside an SEO expert. 

Security

Website security is hugely important in 2020. A whopping 85% of online shoppers avoid unsecure websites - websites without an SSL certificate. I won't go into vast amounts of detail about SSL certificates here as we have a whole blog on this topic already available. Take a look at our blog post on SSL certificates here. 

A good website developer will be able to install you an SSL certificate to ensure your website is safe to use. Don't get ripped off though! SSL certificates can be free from sites such as Lets Encrypt so don't pay through the roof for one. A developer may charge for the installation of the certificate but argue your case if they try to charge you for the certificate itself!

Your website security doesn't stop here. Millions of websites get hacked every single day by various means and methods. You want to ensure that your website is as secure as it can be from hackers. There are a few different precautions that you can take here, including setting strong passwords and ensuring you keep all plugins up to date. Here is an excellent article with some additional information. 

Design

We all want to look the part with sleek, professional web design which portrays our brand exactly the way we want to be seen. But to accomplish this, you need to find a developer with a level of design skill too. Consider the influence of colour, positioning of images and text and even the fonts used to create your dream site. 

Conversion Rate Optimisation

We'll hold our hands up here and let you know that finding a developer who also knows about conversion rate optimisation might be tricky. 

Conversion rate optimisation is, by definition:

"Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise."

CRO is influenced by a lot of factors, but simple web design elements such as the positioning of a phone number or contact form can profoundly influence this marketing practice. By working with a developer who has strong marketing contacts, you can receive SEO and CRO elements all built into your website. 

Feel free to reach out to us if this is of interest to you. We work alongside David at The Pattern Factor to offer website development with built-in SEO and CRO services. 

URL's and Links

One of the most common issues I see after a website re-design is when the developer or client has updated and changed their URL's and haven't put redirects in place. Usually, we would encourage clients to leave their URL's and links exactly the same but if you do choose to change these be sure to set up redirects. If you don't set up redirects, traffic to your site may land on 404 not found pages. Remember, it's not just pages within your website that are connected. Other websites or social media sites may also contain links to your site, and it may be impossible to update these (if they haven't been shared by yourself, for example). So set up redirects to be on the safe side. 

I hope these tips were helpful and feel free to reach out in the comments below if you have any questions!