10 things to do before designing a new website

It’s vital to set out exactly what the main objective of your website is. Do you want people to call you? Buy products or services from your online shop? Visit your physical premises or book an appointment? Reserve a table? What is your desired outcome once people engage with your site?

Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. For example, perhaps you want to increase the number of enquiries by 50% per month, or to reflect your new branding on your site. Maybe you want to increase online sales by 10%, or you need your site to be more accessible or responsive.

Having a specific goal makes it much easier for your chosen website design company to understand what to prioritise and why. For more tips, this post looks at 10 reasons to redesign your website.

Are you looking to build a brand-new website from scratch? Or will you use your existing site as the building blocks and make the necessary amendments? Is it just the look and feel you want to change, or does it need to be completely restructured with new functionality?

Perhaps you built your first site and have outgrown it, and now you’re looking for a bespoke option with additional functionality that you can’t get from a templated website.

It might help at this point to read our post on WordPress versus a bespoke website to discover some of the benefits of choosing bespoke.

If you decide to go for a new design, it’s important to have a clear idea of your brand. Understanding your mission and vision and being able to clearly articulate that will help your chosen website design company to translate that into a website. Knowing your brand values and how you want your brand to be perceived by your customers will inform your visual identity and copy for your new site.

You might need to do some groundwork on your brand before you get started on the new website design.

At We Make Media, we can work with you on your visual brand identity. Our editor, Jennie, is a trained journalist with over two decades of experience helping businesses tell their story and our designer, Jeff, has also worked as both a graphic and web designer for over twenty years. Feel free to get in touch to find out how we can help with your branding and brand identity.

Part of understanding your brand is knowing who your audience is. This is vital if you are going to convince them to invest in and buy from you. Who and where are they? What are they looking for? What problem do they need solving? What are their browsing habits? What keywords are they searching for? 

Before enlisting a web design company to work on your new design, it can be helpful to create a buyer persona. If you have an existing website, look at your analytics to gather data about the people who currently visit your site. It should tell you their geographic location, age range, interests, what devices they use and much more. This is valuable information that will inform your new website design.

Analyse your competitors before you embark on a new website design. What are others in your industry doing? What are they doing well and where are they falling short, and do they have any weaknesses you could capitalise on? 

If you already have a website, you have the ideal opportunity to do some user testing. Ask someone you know, preferably one of your ideal clients, to use your website and a competitor’s website and compare the two. If you don’t have an existing website, ask people to use your competitors’ websites and let you know what they like about them and what they don’t. This information can then inform your new website design.

As well as analysing your audience, your analytics can give you lots of information about how your audience engages with your existing website. Use that data to audit your current website. It will tell you what is working and what isn’t. Analytics will provide information about your site visits, landing pages, user flow, exit pages, bounce rate, dwell time and more. 

You will see which pages are the most popular and which ones aren’t visited very often. This will help you determine what pages or content you can cut and what to improve.

One of the things that sets We Make Media apart from other website design companies is that we believe SEO should be taken into consideration from the outset of your project. It shouldn’t be an afterthought. 

We encourage our clients to have an ongoing strategy designed to help improve search ranking and keep them at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

You may find it useful to read our article on the importance of SEO for a website redesign.

If you’re thinking of a new design, consider a content strategy. Having a blog on your site is not only a great opportunity to improve your SEO, but also to share your knowledge and create valuable content for users that helps build authority and trust in their eyes. A blog can help your customers solve their problems, make purchasing decisions, overcome objections, answer any frequently asked questions and decide whether your business is a good fit for them.

If you have a blog on your existing website, you could update or rewrite the posts. Check your analytics to see which content performs well and which is rarely read.

If you are designing a brand-new website, create a schedule to publish useful and optimised content to improve user engagement. 

The cost of a new design can vary dramatically depending on many factors, such as the website size, style and functionality, and also the scale of the work involved. It will vary depending on whether you opt for a bespoke or templated design.

You should be able to find a website design company no matter what your budget is, so it’s important to think about the value and not just the cost. For a good return, it pays to make a good investment in the first place. 

At We Make Media, the cost of a website design can range from £500 to £10,000. The average cost is around £2,000. We’d be more than happy to discuss your budget and see if we can help you.

Finally, choosing the right people to work with is important. Every company will have different processes, costs, unique selling points and strengths.

We’ve put together some guidelines to help you choose the best web design company for your needs. 

We Make Media is a Devon-based web design company. We’ve been helping small businesses grow in the West Country since 2010. If you’re interested in a website design for your business, we would be happy to discuss what you’re looking for and how we can help. Book your free discovery call.