Not sure why your online sales are down in Cape Town? Have you ever considered that your outdated website could be one of the reasons? We are living in a fast-paced digital era and web design trends in Cape Town are constantly changing. If you are not keeping up when it comes to your online presence, your business can suffer.
Now that you have an idea as to why your business might be struggling, think about ways to improve your digital marketing strategy, starting with a fresh website design. Your website is one of the most effective ways to not only promote and sell your products and services, but to build credibility for your business. Therefore, it is important to implement the latest and best user experience design principles and practices. To remain on top of your game today, you need to adapt to new web design trends being implemented in the Cape Town area.
How to tell if your web design is outdated?
Your website may be outdated if your content is not regularly updated, if the text and fonts used on your website are non-web-safe or if your website is taking forever to load.
It’s also important to make sure that your website displays correctly on all devices. Having a mobile-friendly or responsive website is crucial. According to statistics, there are 22.4 million mobile phone users in South Africa alone. Therefore, it is important to make sure your website is responsive. As a guideline, cross-check your site against other best responsive websites.
Ready to redesign your old website?
Start by compiling a website redesign checklist
Dive into the following questions:
- Why is a website redesign important?
- Why should you redesign your website?
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
And lastly,
- Are you aligning your website to your current business strategy?
Here are six points to prioritise when compiling your website design checklist:
1. Establish your web design goals
Before starting your new website design project, outline key objectives you would like to achieve. Do you need to increase website traffic, sales or customer retention? Each goal, big or small will eventually align to achieve whatever your ultimate objective may be.
Set your goals, align your team toward achieving them and be sure to track the web redesign process against measurable metrics. Test your new web design against your old website. In digital marketing, this would be coined as ‘A/B testing’. Have you A/B tested your website before? If not, get cracking. The only way to truly evaluate your consumer journey would be to draw raw data directly from users coming to your site.
2. Start using Google analytics
To make accurate and informed decisions about your new website design, you need to understand the visitors coming to your site. Google Analytics gives you insight into your customers’ demographics such as their age, gender and geographical location.
How is this data relevant to the design of your site? It will allow you to better understand the user experience of the visitors coming to your website. Perhaps you have an audience between the ages of 18 to 35 who prefer a minimalistic design or an audience between the ages of 36 to 55 who prefer a busier more interactive site, hence you would need to keep this data in mind when designing your website.
You can easily pick up design trends in the data drawn from your Google Analytics report, which may prompt you to adjust colour schemes or simple call-to-action buttons to the preferences of your audience’s online behaviour.
Remember to constantly monitor every change you make to your website using Google Analytics to see what works for your business and what does not.
3. Create a customer persona
Once you have plugged in Google Analytics to your website, develop a customer persona from the data you are analysing. Why? A persona will give any small business owner a holistic view as to what type of user you may be redesigning your website for.
Remember, customer is KING.
A basic customer persona will consist of the following information:
- Customer Name – John Wick
- Demographic Information – Male, 22, small business owner
- Interests – War craft, matrix, YouTube.
- Behaviour – price-sensitive, browses through customer reviews before purchasing products online.
4. Do frequent keyword researches
In your new website design process, pay attention to on-page and off-page optimisation. Ensure you understand your customer before optimising your website. Not only will on-page and off-page optimisation increase the likelihood of your site popping up in search engines, but it will also make your website more user-friendly as visitors coming to your site will most likely want to spend more time reading and browsing around your site.
5. Run content and SEO audits
A website redesign does not necessarily mean an entire brand shift. It is a few design tweaks here and there to better suit the requirements of your target audience. Apart from adjusting your website design, you need to edit your content too by doing frequent SEO audits. How? There are plenty of free SEO audit tools.
Updating your content along with your new website redesign will allow your website to reach new heights and achieve optimum results.
6. Set a style guide
Consistent design practices add credibility to your brand’s tone. Create a style guide that can be used in the redesign of your website, as well as for other marketing purposes. Here are three important points to outline in your style guide:
- Colour scheme
- Font styles
- Imagery
When you create your website redesign checklist, tick off your changes as you go along. Review your changes once more, test it out a couple of times and, when you are ready, publish it! Monitor your new website redesign closely and try your best to adjust changes needed to your site quickly if needed.
As an entrepreneur or small business owner it may be tricky to monitor your website redesign. A suggestion, either become an expert when redesigning your new site or hire an expert to do it for you. Either way, a website redesign is important and should be tackled properly.
