Thinking of redesigning your website, STOP, ask yourself yourself first: Am I simply covering over the cracks?
Well let’s go to Company X. Company X have sixteen employees. Six years ago they moved into a new office building. It was a beautiful office with new paint and carpet.
Bit by bit the office space became messier. The files are everywhere, coffee cups here and there, some of the carpet areas are worn out already or stained beyond repair and paint was starting to peel off the walls. Let alone work is becoming more and more slower to execute.
Then the CEO decided something drastic needs to be done. It’s redesign time, massive renovation time is ahead. They are going to paint and change carpet, reorganize the filling cabinets. New office furniture and machines and a big skip for rubbish for all that stuff they should have thrown away years ago.
After the redesign, everything will look great for a while. But unless they change the way they operate in the office, in another six years they’ll have to do another redesign. A major difference between the Company X office space and your website is: Your customers are asking, not only to visit, but to spend quality time there, too.
Website redesign is almost always a bad marketing idea as it is always approached as a project-based not a process-based. The best websites are simply managed as a process not as projects.
A website redesign approach is usually embraced as a reaction, not as an analysis, to the fact that the website have fallen into disrepair. Something is not working and the belief is that a nice redesign, some nice new graphics here and there, an explosive intro, new enhanced colors, and perhaps the purchase of some fancy content management software, will solve all the website drawbacks.
This approach can only be defined as: covering over the cracks. These cracks are the result of lack of resources to professionally manage the website, lack of genuine customer focus, and a lack of continuous content testing and evolution – on a daily basis. These cracks are a lack of a thorough review process to ensure that only quality content remains on the website.
Website redesign is also often a product of boredom or even new management. The web management team or even the marketing department is bored with the same old website. They want to freshen it up. I wonder how long such people would last at Yahoo if they said they were bored with the Yahoo homepage.
Website redesign should be a your last alternative and choice of action. If your website is an absolute disaster and your customers despise it so much they’re flocking it, then a redesign and a sweeping overhaul may be in order.
Having coming across perfectly okay websites – and designing some of them, too – go through a redesign for all the wrong reasons. And whom do you think such redesigns hurt the most? Your most loyal customers. Because they use your website the most.
A redesign is nearly always a bad marketing strategy. In fact, website redesigns are often pursued by organizations that don’t have a web strategy to begin with.
In simpler words, change the template, colors, fonts, ………… but not the design.