Website Redesign Part 2: Target Audience, Page Goals, Art Direction, and SEO
This is part two of my three-part blog post about Website Redesign. The first part can be found here. I wrote about the definition of challenges and goals for the website and in part two I will cover the planning stage of the process: audience, content, and functionality.
Determine the Target Audience of Your Website
The target audience is a subset of visitors that are coming to your website and want to purchase your product, learn more about the services, or in any other way to help you reach the goals you’ve defined in part one of the article. I say “subset” because you may have visitors on your website that land on the pages looking for something completely different and are not really the individuals you are trying to engage.
When you are planning a website redesign you may be able to easily define your target audience based on your products and services – you’re already working with that audience outside of the web, right? The target audience may be an age group, a group of professionals in a specific industry, people born under the sign of Gemini, or any other classification that aligns well with your offerings.
At certain times, however, you maybe able to perform additional recon through Google Analytics on your existing website (you do have analytics on your current website, right?). Some things to consider and research:
- Look at the organic traffic coming from Google – what keywords are being used in search to find your website? Are these the ones you are strategically using or do they tell a story or an opportunity you haven’t discovered yet?
- Look at the user agents and determine what type of browsers individuals are using to surf your website. A large percentage of older IE browsers may indicate a government or manufacturing industry audience as their terminals are usually running older software and are sluggish to move to new technologies because of incompatibility with legacy systems.
- Furthermore, based on the above, you should be able to understand the screen resolution used, mobile platforms you should cater to, and many other aspects that should help with the research.
When you have identified your target audiences you will be able to proceed to defining goals on pages for those audiences and the SEO strategy to nurture the organic traffic based on keywords that those audiences use to search. Make sure that your design, copy, and font sizes are appropriate for the audiences.
Understand the Goals of Website Pages
A big mistake that is often made by inexperienced teams is to just move the existing content to a new design. While a fresh layer of paint is always nice, you really need to determine if the goals you’ve set for your website will be achieved after the redesign. This often involves creating interaction plans and making sure that all audiences are being addressed. Let me elaborate.
All pages on the website have to have a specific goal (or several) – there should not be any “filler” pages that one or other department just wants to add because everyone else has them. The purpose of any page on the website can range between:
- Informing the visitor about a product or service
- Developing credibility for company by documenting their operating history
- Peaking interest of visitor with a clever blog post and gaining SEO value
- Urging the visitor to click on a “conversion” button – be it a lead creation or product being added to the cart
- Any other purpose that informs, interacts, promotes, and so on
Some pages, such as the homepage, may have several goals associated with them: inform the visitor of our offering, make us look credible, click on the “learn more” button and so on. It’s important to understand that the more goals we load on a page – the less focus we’re going to grab from the user because our goals will compete. When planning high-visibility pages such as the homepage it is thus very important to use something like the 80/20 rule and distill the core offerings of the site without assaulting the senses of the visitor.
Establish the Art Direction
You want to make sure that your brand identity is communicated through the new look of the website. Even if you have a solid base, you should always consider refreshing the logo and modernizing the brand. Even powerful brands like Coca-Cola are reinventing themselves over time so don’t think that the logo you had designed fifteen years ago needs to stay exactly the same. We always recommend a gradual progression: no drastic changes to the logotype, but perhaps a cleaner typeface, new patterns, slightly adjusted colors for the website and marketing materials – if needed.
Even though part of the direction will be dictated by the logotype and brand colors, you should feel free to explore the web and look at competitor websites. Web technologies are changing rapidly and you may find that additional creativity can be utilized during the redesign. We always like when customers have a set of websites that they really like – even if they are outside of their industry. This allows us to understand the styles you like and also manage your expectations and direction.
I will write more about the process of wireframing and design in part three of this post.
Implement a Search Engine Optimization Strategy
This topic in itself has spawned countless articles and books so I will not expand too much. There is a core set of rules one should follow when publishing content on the website to maximize organic traffic and they are:
- Website has to use valid markup – the HTML code has to adhere to a certain set of rules so that search engines could easily read your content and file it away. You can use this validator: http://validator.w3.org/. Some errors may not be a big deal, but it’s a good practice to check.
- Website should have clean URL’s – a clean URL is a “human readable” URL such as /buy/apples/. A bad example would be /cart/product.aspx?id=1 – it’s not human readable and does not say anything about the product being viewed.
- Pages should have Meta information with relevant keywords – your page title should use the keywords you’re targeting, the description should be cohesive, and the meta keywords should also be picked carefully.
- All pages should have an H1 tag – that’s the most important headline tag and some search engines use it to determine the type of content on the page.
- Write content around your keywords – select the keywords you want to target and then assemble content that is useful, relevant, and uses those keywords within it’s context.
- Establish backlinks – a backlink is a link from another website to your website. The higher the page rank of the referring website – the more “value” it brings to your site. Most of the time the page you want to be linked from is the homepage as it has the highest page rank of the site (usually).
SEO is a lot of work and any good strategy takes close to years to implement and get benefits from. Here are some articles that I find beneficial on the subject:
Coming Soon – Part 3
This concludes the second part of the series. I hope that the article has been helpful and as a result you have fresh new ideas on how to approach the redesign of the next website. Next article will cover the implementation stage: wireframes, design, feedback, launch, and post-launch review.
