Website Redesign: The Complete Guide

Now more than ever, having a website is essential for most businesses. Since 2020, e-commerce has seen unprecedented growth, driven by the pandemic and successive lockdowns. Therefore, refining your online presence is more crucial than ever for your business. Could this be the perfect opportunity to redesign your website?

Why Redesign Your Website?

Your website is the digital storefront of your business. Whether you run an e-commerce site, an agency, or offer services, your website must reflect your company’s image. It should therefore be constantly updated—whether in terms of content, appearance and design, or technical aspects.

Different Ways to Redesign Your Website

To redesign your website, you can use several methods. If budget is a concern, check out our solutions for creating an affordable website. For example, you could redesign your site yourself—but this assumes you already have web development skills. If you don’t, you have two options: hire someone in-house or outsource to a service provider.

Hiring someone in-house only makes sense if you have long-term needs. Otherwise, outsourcing to a specialist in website creation and redesign is the most viable solution. This provider could be a freelancer or an agency. Freelancers are generally cheaper but have fewer resources than a structured agency. At Scroll, we offer the best of both worlds: our agency is also a collective of freelancers. We can therefore provide a wide range of services at the best price to support your redesign project.

Website Redesign: Key Elements to Keep in Mind

When embarking on a website redesign project, you need to consider several key elements. You should be able to answer each of these questions to successfully bring your project to life. If you’re unsure, don’t panic—agencies are there to guide and assist you in making the right choices.

What will your new site’s design look like?

Your website’s design is crucial. It must reflect your values and be user-friendly to ensure a smooth experience for your visitors. The logo, color choices, fonts, layout—all of these require careful thought!

Which acquisition channels will you activate?

How will users find your site? Thinking about your new website’s acquisition channels is once again essential. If you want to focus on organic or paid search, you’ll need to create landing pages tailored to specific keywords or queries.

What will the customer journey on the site look like?

Your customer journey also requires careful planning. Depending on the products or services you offer, it may be more or less complex, but your goal is to keep it clear and accessible for your users.

What features will your site offer?

Many websites include more or less advanced features. Contact forms, web apps, e-commerce sections—all of these require development, so you’ll need to choose the ones most relevant to your online business.

What will be the technical foundations of your new site?

Finally, the technical aspect is critical. Which CMS will you use? WordPress, Webflow, Drupal, Shopify… Not all CMS platforms are equally suited to your website redesign goals. At Scroll, we’re big fans of Webflow: this no-code CMS allows us to pay special attention to your site’s design, customizing it down to the smallest detail—all in record time and without sacrificing performance.

Website Redesign: Key Steps

When you want to redesign your website—whether it’s a showcase site, an e-commerce site, or a simple blog—you’ll need to go through several essential steps. Here are the 9 steps to redesign your website.

Define Your Goal

The first step is to ask yourself why you want to redesign your website. Do you want to capture more leads? Improve its technical performance? Refresh its design? All goals are valid, but your website will look different depending on what you want to achieve.

Draft a Comprehensive Redesign Brief

The brief for your website redesign should be as detailed as possible. It will help you formalize your project and guide the agency you’ll be working with. A good brief should include:

• Project and company overview
• Redesign objectives
• Description of your brand guidelines—or, if you don’t have any, a collection of available visual elements: inspirations, screenshots of the current site, etc.
• Description of expected features
• Description of expected technical capabilities
• List of all desired services: technical maintenance, SEO, content creation, etc.

The more comprehensive and detailed your brief is, the better your partner agency will be able to support you and propose a project that meets your expectations. The quote provided will also be more accurate.

Create Your Site Architecture

Designing your new site’s architecture is a key element of your redesign. The architecture will impact your SEO, advertising, customer journey, page mockups, content creation—in short, your site’s architecture affects everything else in the redesign!

This is therefore a crucial step for any website redesign.

Create Your Brand Guidelines

Your brand guidelines define the visual identity of your website. A redesign is the perfect opportunity to update and refresh them. Brand guidelines should include:

• A logo
• The fonts used for your text
• The color palette used across your pages

As we’ve seen, your site’s design is an element you can’t afford to neglect. It builds user trust and helps them recognize your brand. To help you define your brand guidelines, Scroll works with brilliant designers!

Create Your Mockups

Once you have your site architecture and brand guidelines, the next step is to shape your elements. This is the mockup phase, an essential part of any website redesign.

Who better than a UX or UI expert to help you create clear web pages that simplify the user journey?

You’ll need to create mockups for all your page types. If you run an e-commerce site, you’ll need at least a homepage, category pages, product pages, and checkout pages where users can enter their payment details. If you want to add a blog, think about article pages, article categories, and the blog homepage.

Integration: Choosing the Right CMS

Once your mockups are ready, you’ll need to integrate them. These days, you don’t need to hard-code your site—many CMS options exist to meet all your needs. WordPress is certainly the most well-known, but others are worth considering, such as Shopify or Drupal.

At Scroll, we’re particularly fond of Webflow. Its editor mode allows us to focus on your site’s design. Additionally, this no-code CMS will give you full control over your content at any time, allowing you to modify or adapt it. A simple and elegant solution that suits all website redesign projects!

Create the Staging Environment and Launch the Site

When tackling a website redesign, you’ll set up a staging environment. This is usually a subdomain that users and search engines can’t access. A password may be required to log in.

The purpose of the staging environment is to technically integrate all your site’s pages. It allows you to ensure your site is viable before its final launch. Once staging is complete, you’ll need to migrate the new site to your domain so users can access it.

Monitor Your Site’s Performance

Once your new site is live, precisely measure its performance. Several factors need to be considered to ensure the redesign was a success.

• Traffic levels: Check that your site is still attracting as many users (or more!). You can verify this using tools like Google Analytics.
• Search engine visibility: Has the redesign been beneficial or harmful to your organic search rankings? Google’s Search Console provides valuable insights here.
• Page load times. A website redesign is also an opportunity for a technical upgrade. Your new site should therefore perform better than the old one. Use PageSpeed Insights to measure your pages’ load times.
• Conversion rate. The goal of your redesign is also to better engage users and generate more revenue through your site. Use Analytics to check that users continue to convert.

Depending on your goals, some factors will be more or less important. It’s up to you to decide which ones are most relevant!

Scroll: Website Creation and Redesign Agency

Looking to redesign your website? Scroll is here to help. Thanks to our team of freelancers from diverse backgrounds, we can support you throughout your entire project, from conception to launch. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn more!

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