How to sail your website
If you don’t keep a close eye on your website, over time, it’ll drift.
Not a huge amount each day, and if you’re not paying attention, you won’t notice at first. But drifting it is.
Why?
With websites, what typically happens is this:
You undertake a website redesign project and, if it’s a thorough process, the web design partner will ask you probing questions such as:
- What is your brand?
- What are your products / services?
- Who is your audience for these products/services?
- What is the sales process like?
- Why do people buy from you?
- What is your unique selling point?
- What is your tone of voice
….etc etc, you get the idea.
The questions being asked here are the fundamental ones which help position your website so that, when your potential clients land on your website, they immediately feel at home with a website fine-tuned to resonate with their needs.
The activates them into a state where they are much more likely to take the next steps in your sales process.
The Wind Blows
If you’re sailing a yacht and take down the sails, you can still find yourself travel along (maybe not a lot, but a little). Why? Because the sea is moving, the tides are occurring, conditions are changing all the time.
Very much like your business.
Your business, and the market within which it operates, is changing all the time.
Time passes…
So, it’s now been a few years since your last major website redesign project.
If we revisited the questions above, would you answer them all the same way?
I’d bet you wouldn’t!
Because many of the following will have changed e.g.
- The products and services you wish to offer
- The type of business and brand you want to run
- Your market
- Your target audience(s)
- Your vision etc
Now you may well have made some minor changes to your website in that time: a new page for a new service here, added some testimonials there, a new blog article etc. However, that’s not enough and what is happening is that your website is drifting further and further away from where you need it to be.
And the further your website drifts, the more of hiderence it becomes in terms of converting visitors into valuable customers.
What needs to be done?
Every couple of years, you’ll certainly need a full website redesign project; allowing us to go through the process & questions mentioned above.
Helping to realign your website with the direction you want it to travel.
WordPress changes significantly over time so this also presents an opportunity to take advantage of new features e.g. with the new Gutenberg editor we typically create a ‘design system‘ for modern websites; allowing clients to better manage and expand their websites themselves; helping better future-proof them against the sea of changes.
Final Thoughts
We’ve been developing great-looking, high-quality websites, that deliver results, for many years. And in our experience, such well built websites last a considerable period of time. So whilst you may not want to start budgeting for a website redesign project, bear in mind you could be looking at only £10 per day.
So I would encourage you to trim the sails of your website and start thinking of getting it ship-shape for the next leg of your journey.
Joel
p.s. Feel I could have added more maritime references like ‘compass’, ‘taking a reading’, ‘keelhauling’ etc? Feel free bring it up in our Facebook Group for businesses who use WordPress.
p.p.s the lovely image of yachts is by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.