Website Development
Your website is a direct reflection of your business and how you engage with your audience
Are you embarrassed to promote your website to customers?
Does your website need updating to improve your SEO?
Is your website difficult to use on a mobile device?
Updating your website and keeping it fresh is an important part of staying relevant to your customers and ahead of your competition.
There are many reasons you may need to consider redeveloping your website. It may not be optimised for small screen devices, it could have poor navigation, it may take too long to load or it may be outdated and no longer aligned with your brand or target audience.
A poor performing and badly designed website can have a direct impact on your Search Engine Optimisation, paid ad bounce rates, conversion rates and your businesses bottom line.
Let us make it easy
Redesigning or redeveloping your website should be as frictionless as possible. While this is a well planned out process, there are checks put in place to ensure your audience loves your shiny new website and you don't lose any SEO benefits of your existing website.
What does a typical project look like?
While most websites are different and serve a specific audience, the redevelopment process and steps involved are very much the same, regardless of the size of the project.
1/ Analyse the existing website
An important first step is to understand what elements of your existing website are working and what is not. This will include performing an SEO audit, reviewing analytics data, understanding and identifying trends in visitor behavior and journey paths and surveying users where possible. A snapshot of the site will be taken and all elements captured in an easy to use project template.
2/ Align priorities with business goals
It's important to ensure the website purpose and goals are aligned with your business objectives. This includes understanding the number of conversions you need to make in a week or month and cost per conversion. Being clear on your outcomes allows you to focus on achieving your desired results with your redesign, SEO and expectations of all people involved.
3/ Define your target audience
Your businesses target audience evolves over time and as your business grows. As you add new products or services to your website or expand into new markets, you need to update your messaging for the people who are most able and willing to buy from you. Knowing how to appeal to your target audience will help you make smart decisions on your website redesign journey.
4/ Map user flows
It's important to consider what action you want a visitor to take once they land on your website. This includes the homepage and all inner pages. Map out the journey you anticipate a user taking on your website that will ultimately lead to a conversion and what calls to action will be needed. This action could be signing up to an offer or newsletter or making a purchase. Once the website is live we will then use these conversion paths to setup and automate goal and conversion tracking reports in Google Analytics.
5/ Define content types and templates
Once we know the general requirements and functionality needed of the website we can consider what type of page templates we need. This will not include one for the homepage and inner pages but templates for landing pages, sales pages, reviews, testimonials, products, squeeze pages, confirmation pages and forms.
6/ Review the website taxonomy
It's important for a visitor to your website quickly and easily be able to determine and understand where they are. They will typically do this by using the websites menu or referring trail navigation or breadcrumbs. When we review the existing menu structure we will confirm what pages are no longer needed, should be renamed and need to be relocated to a different location within the website.
7/ Setup a staging site and begin build
Once we know what templates are needed, the navigation of the website and have confirmed the design requirements, we will setup a staging website, this is a temporary site on a different URL to your live site to begin building out the new website, it's structure, functionality and design. We will also perform testing on the staging site to ensure everything works as expected.
8/ Website copy load and SEO
After we have the staging site ready with the new or updated design and layout, we can load up the reviewed and updated website copy, assets, images and any media, align and test our keywords, page descriptions, metadata and sitemaps. We will need to ensure there are no pages competing within the site for keyword and review the overall tone of voice of the website.
9/ Test and release
Once we have all our design elements in place and website copy loaded and we are happy with the new design and layout, we can begin testing across different platforms and devices to ensure the site loads as fast, is easy to use and navigate and looks good. Once given the go ahead, we will package up and lift and shift the website over to the live website address. Perform a thorough check on all pages, run a broken link check, ensure the site can be indexed and submit our new sitemaps to Google.
10/ Ongoing maintenance
Once your new website is live the fun begins. We can begin attracting new visitors to the site and reporting on goals we have in place and conversions over time. Analytics reports can be created and regular backups scheduled. Regular maintenance of the website will be needed to ensure the site is secure and performs effectively across various search engines.
If you're ready, we are too!
We take what we do seriously. Digital marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, SEO, it all takes time. It's also an investment and we're here to ensure you maximise your return on this investment.