You may develop your website before anyone. And you did it before any of your current competitors. But now the technological advancement and many other factors are compelling you to redesign your website. Now you would like to redesign your site. a great redesign is really a huge success as well as can be a flop. For that reason, we set out to some basic directional idea for any kind of inbound marketer. Use these for your website redesign plan and make a successful web site redesign. It may that you are using an agency or you are redesigning by yourself your site the guideline will assist you strategize the website redesign in a manner you want it.

We have identified seven steps of website redesign: strategy, plan, design, build, optimize, launch, and analyze. But none of the latter six stages will be effective without putting a lot of focus on that first stage that is strategy.

Benchmark Your Current Metrics:

Before you begin planning your redesign, know and record your current performance metrics. Start by analyzing your existing site over its history in areas like:

Number of visits/

Number of visitors/unique visitors (per day)

Top pages that receive traffic

Time on site (average)

Top-performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)

Number of inbound linking domains

Number of new leads/form submissions (per month)

Total amount of sales generated (per month)

Total number of pages indexed

Make note of the tools you used to identify each of these particular benchmarks. Because you will want to use those same exact tools when collecting post-design metrics. Otherwise, you will be comparing apples to oranges.

Set Up Your Redesign Goals:

Why you want to redesign your website? there should always be a good reason behind it. It is not just about how your site looks, but rather how it works. Be really clear about why you are doing the redesign. Fix some goals and tie those goals to measureable results. Then communicate your goals with your team, designer, or agency. Here you may find some reasons:

Increasing number of visits/visitors

Reducing bounce rate

Improving domain authority

Improving number of new leads/form submissions

Improving total amount of sales generated

Enhancing current SEO rankings for important keywords

Many of these metrics-driving goals are dependent on one other. For example, in order to generate more conversions, you may also need to increase traffic while decreasing your site’s bounce rate.

Planning:

Like strategy, planning is all about the specifics. Here you will do the frame work for your website redesign. According to you need make the specific planning to improve your site.

What specifically is missing from your current website? Sometimes, a website simply needs a simple visualizing changes, and sometime it needs complete technological up gradation, but keep in mind that there are plenty of outdated websites raking in major revenue online. Even if you have nothing obviously dysfunctional to fix, a redesign is the perfect opportunity to optimize your whole site to give it a fresh and better look for the new customers.

What is your marketing strategy? This is one of the most important points to define in the strategy and planning stages. What will your marketing strategy be? If your number-one goal is building an email list, your website could look much different than if your marketing strategy is focused online sales or channeling users to your online store. Most websites can be adjusted to facilitate a given marketing strategy, but doing a dedicated redesign is the perfect opportunity to customize your online platform specifically for your online strategy.

Protect Your Search Engine Optimized Pages:

The rank on search engine and getting found is very important cause if you have a great site but no one is coming in your site then how can you increase new leads and how you convert them into sales? So keeping the SEO in the mind you need do some basic things before you redesign your site.

keyword research is very important. For every page on your newly designed site, pick one keyword/topic that the page will focus on. consider adding new content and pages to your website that address those particular keywords and topics that are neglected on your existing website.

Benchmark all of your most search-valued pages.

Use your marketing analytic to figure out which pages receive the most traffic and inbound links, convert the most leads, and ultimately cover the most influential topics in your industry. If you plan to remove, make sure you create the proper 301 redirects. Carefully Make a 301 redirect strategy. Because 301 redirects are very important in terms of retaining the traffic and link.

An Eye towards the Competition:

While we do not recommend preoccupying over your competitors, it can help to know how you relate. Run your website through different free Marketing tools to generate a report card of how your website and marketing is performing. Take a look of the prominent competitors of your business and see how they are applying their ideas to their new or old website you might find some ideas that really works for you.

Take Inventory of Your High-Performing Assets:

Whereas a redesign is a great way to increase the performance of your website, unfortunately, there are also numerous ways in which it can upset you. Your current website likely contains many high-performing resources that you have been building up for a long time, and losing their effectiveness because of a redesign can severely damage your marketing results. For instance, such

assets might include your:

Most shared or viewed content

High-trafficked pages

Best performing/ranking keywords and associated pages

Number of inbound links to individual pages

Like, if you end up removing a page from your site that has gathered a high number of inbound links, you could potentially lose a lot of SEO credit, which will make it gradually difficult for you to get found in search. Keep in mind that many web designers do not consider this step because they are neither marketers nor SEO specialists. So carefully choose and build your website that not only improve the look and functionality but also keep your SEO as it is or may be enhanced.

Sources:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33924/How-to-Develop-a-Website-Redesign-Strategy-That-Guarantees-Results-Free-Template.aspx

http://blog.invisionapp.com/7-elements-of-a-website-redesign-process/

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf