Building a Website is a necessity for Businesses nowadays, but what is more important is its effectiveness, how people feel when they visit your Website, how do they feel navigating on it, how it represents your Business, is it as effective as it should be?

We have worked with a lot of clients who were in doubt if they should re-design their website or just keep the one that they had and the question they all had was “Do we need to redesign our current website or do you need to improve what we already have?!”

How can you evaluate the effectiveness of your current Website?

Some areas to be focused on are:

1. Mobile responsiveness – Nowadays people are navigating more on mobile rather than desktop and with that in mind, your website should be responsive for mobile.

2. Design – Design is very important for the website, first of all it should represent you brand and it also should be something that the audience likes and enjoys. Nobody wants to see big walls of text on the website where we all lose interest and do not read it. Users want a website which has a design that is pleasant to look at and informative, minimal, where they can spend time.
3. Content – The Website should contain good content, it should contain a good homepage where you highlight almost every page of your Website, it should be easy to read with headlines and pointers, it should be easy to navigate and for the user to get to the desired place, not complicated, the content should be good enough to use in marketing campaigns.
4. Navigation – Time is of high value and customers do not want to waste time while navigating on your website, that is why the Website should be dynamic and they can easily switch from one page to another and enjoy doing it. If you have a Website that sells products, your customers time to order should be at the top of your priority list.
5. Functionality – If you want an effective Website you got to make sure that everything is up and running, from backlinks to buttons, to pages and products and services everything should be working and sharp so your customers do not have to experience any error messages or unresponsive links.
6. Speed and technology – Does you site load fast? Is it developed in the best way it could be? Is it search engine friendly? Is the technology you’ve used appropriate for the market you operate?
7. Brand – Is it in line with your what your Brand represents or does it hurt it?

How do we improve our existing Website?

You can start by comparing your Website to your competitors. So, let’s assume that you have an E-commerce and you operate in the Fashion Market, what you are interested in is the buying experience of your customers if they can get the product they need in timely fashion or not. If they can buy similar products from your competition and they can get it faster, you should make speed a priority. Also you should be interested in creating a Website that is easier to navigate than the one your competitors have. Design is also important because customers can find your website less attractive than you competitors.

Reporting is also important, what platform do you use for the metrics of your Website? If you use platforms like Google Analytics you can get a lot of insight on the progress that your Website has, how effective it is, how many people click from mobile, how many people from desktop, information on your audience, where are they from, how did they find your website, how many minutes they spend on your website and a lot more information.

What is more important is what you do with the information presented to you , if let’s say for example you see that based on reports the bounce rate (the rate which a visitor leaves the page) is higher on mobile but not that high on desktop then, you should change something in your mobile site because there is something wrong.

If you have a lot of locals visiting your Website but you are interested in selling world wide you should maybe change the content, or market your website in a way that is going to change the reports.

Example

We will give you an example, one of our customers who was in the manufacturing domain, had a static HTML page where they showed information about their business, contact and some pictures for their work portfolio. They upgraded into an E-commerce site, now they can sell product directly from their website, get feedback on their product and have client register with their own account this way they can get notifications on the new products and deals. From this investment their profits have increased by 20% that is not bad a bad investment if you ask me.

I believe that what we are trying to emphasize on is that your Website, should be tailor made for your Business, it should compliment the identity that your Brand has established and work in its favor not the other way around and most importantly for it to have a positive effect on your customers.

All in all, every Business needs a Website and creating one and maintaining it sometimes is not enough, if you have a website which you have built in 2015 there are a lot of different features, builds, updates and styles that have come along all this time.

So, either you redesign or improve the website that you already have what’s important is for it to have the effectiveness that you need from it.