Your website is the most critical component to your online marketing strategy; to get new business. It not only helps educate your user base but also enhances or complements your marketing efforts.
If your website does not offer what your buyers need, you risk losing business to your competitors. So, why not make it work harder and do more for your company? Why not make it more engaging to your users and entice them to have an interaction with your company? For this you either REDESIGN your website or RE-ALIGN your website to the changing needs of your users.
Redesigning or Re-Aligning?
Simply said Re-designing is a drastic or a complete change to your existing website. Compared to this Re-Aligning seeks to arrange the websites components to make it more user engaging and reaching your objectives.
For a re-design or realignment of your website to be effective, it must stem from the understanding of what does and what doesn’t work on the current website, How has the user needs changed since the last design or redesign. In most cases, it is sufficient to make minor changes in the user interface. Google, Yahoo, Amazon and a bunch of others follow this strategy with great success: you can hardly see significant changes on their websites though they’re perfecting their design constantly.
User Preference
Repeat users of your website dictate whether you should redesign or realign your website. Even though redesign would enhance the look of your website, most repeat users would not be happy. They would want their “familiar” design as they can locate things easily, get things done and leave.
On the contrary, a realignment of your website functionalities would go a long way to enhance user loyalty. If your website does not generate too much repeat users, then you could get your website redesigned.
Old war horse and also redundant
If your design has incrementally evolved over the period, and the overall user experience has become overly convoluted and has lost any sense of a conceptual unified structure, then redesign becomes inevitable.
SEO Perspective
Redesigning of websites is not about changing the look and feel. It goes much deeper than that. There are instances where the SEO results have plummeted with a radical design change. Redesigning a website without accounting for how changes will affect search rankings can severely hurt the site's traffic. It is important that an SEO expert is on hand while starting the redesign as he would be able to guide your designers effectively.
Here re-aligning gives your website a respite. But you still have to be careful not to tamper with the search parameters.
A great marketing and PR opportunity
Customers have short attention spans and shorter memories. They have to be reminded and updated about things. Re-design or Re-align of your websites provides with an excuse to reach out to your customers and old contacts and let them know what you are doing, what is new and updated. Simply put, these can be a great marketing and PR tool for your organization.
Whether to re-design or re-align your website is your decision. You could seek the services of a professional website support provider to help you decide.
