Oh, great. There’s that guy again. You know… the one who is always talking about himself? He corners you in the break room to tell you all his accomplishments and brag about his talent. Then he monopolizes your time at your favorite coffee house to tell you the same stories about himself over and over again, day after day. He insists on telling you about his latest gadgets or his newest DIY project. Afterward you have no idea what he’s talking about.  (By the way, hasn’t anyone told him about the mustard on his tie or that his fly is down? Not that he’s listening.)

He’s great, he told you so himself. And he doesn’t feel the need to find out if you care.

No one likes the think they may be that guy. But your website might be. If so, it may be time for a website redesign.

A website redesign is due when you need to get found by more prospects, convert a higher percentage of them to leads, and generally improve your brand.

Here are a couple of things to consider…

To Redesign or Not to Redesign: This Should Be the First Question

Just because you’re sick of your site isn’t a good enough reason to redesign. You do it because you want your site to generate leads. That is all.

Cover Your Assets

If you do redesign, make an inventory of all your necessary content, links, keywords, and other assets to make certain they are transferred to the newly redesigned site. You have to preserve all your hard-earned SEO points. And please, please, please tell us you have all your stuff backed up anyway. Somewhere. Anywhere. Except in your brother-in-law’s leaky basement full of magnets.

Home Sweet Home Page

Opting for a flashy home page may impress your executive management but they don’t have to use it to find out the company phone number or figure out what your business sells. Your prospect does, and if he can’t find what he needs within the first few seconds, he’s outta there. You need a useful, easily navigated website with all the essential information on an uncluttered home page. Save the videos for elsewhere.

Get Your Fresh Content!

Search engines love fresh content. It’s like search engine catnip. Blogs, podcasts and e-books, oh my! All are great for keeping not only the search engines coming back, but visitors too. And to be sensational, be educational.

Landing Page, Ho!

This is where you want them to land for specific marketing efforts.  Keep it short and simple. Explain exactly what you want them to do and what’s in it for them. And keep the form above the fold.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3

Don’t just throw your new site out there and leave it. It’ll get lonely. Especially since, without care, the traffic will quickly dwindle. You should be checking your content to see what is converting traffic. Keep tweaking and testing content until it works the way you need it to.

Pinpoint the Pain Points

Metrics are your friends as long as you don’t let them overwhelm you. Most web-hosting services can deliver reams of numbers to you, but some are more useful than others. You want to see:

• How many visitors is your site is getting.
• Where they are coming from.
• How many converted and what converted them, Hallelujah!

With these numbers you can make incremental changes until those numbers are headed in the right direction.

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