Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

So, you’ve decided it’s time for a redesign. All the signs are there, and you’re ready to take the plunge. But where do you start? I’ve seen too many people launch into a web­site redesign without ser­ious con­sid­er­a­tion first, and unfor­tu­nately this can often mean that they’re not get­ting everything they should be from their redesign. A redesign is an invest­ment on your part—both in time and money—and can be a great oppor­tunity to turn your busi­ness around.

1. Get strategic.

Before doing any­thing else, you need to sit down and figure out what you want out of your web­site. The more clearly defined your goals are, the easier it will be for your designer, your copy­writer, and you to direct the pro­ject in order to meet these goals. “I want to pro­mote my com­pany” isn’t a clearly defined goal! You should be thinking instead about who your audi­ence is and what you want them to take away from the web­site. Do you want them to interact with it? Buy products? Send you a quote request? Come back every week to read your blog? Con­sider how you want them to react, feel, and interact with your web­site, and you’ll be closer to having clearly-defined goals.

If you’re having dif­fi­culty defining these goals, it may be helpful to work with a stra­tegic con­sultant, who’ll bring an out­side per­spective to the pro­ject. Anyone out­side of your busi­ness will see it in a very dif­ferent light than you do, which will help you to get a better grasp of what your users are thinking.

2. Eval­uate what works—and what doesn’t—in your cur­rent website

This is the time to be bru­tally honest. If your CEO designed your web­site five years ago, you shouldn’t be afraid to tell him it stinks—if I designed your web­site five years ago, feel free to tell me it stinks! I won’t be offended, it’s prob­ably true. Five years is more like thirty in internet years, and most businesses—and people—will have changed con­sid­er­ably in that span of time. Once you’ve real­ized it’s time for change, you need to be frank in your assess­ment of what’s in place now.

Look at design, SEO, con­tent, and ease-of-use (both for you in updating the site, and for your cus­tomers in using the site). Ask anyone who’ll tell you what they think. Spend a few hours poring over your Ana­lytics to see how users are inter­acting with the site. Better still, drag someone in from off the street, sit him down with your site, and hover over his shoulder while he looks through it. You’ll most likely infuriate him, but it’s incred­ibly useful to actu­ally watch how someone parses your site, and you’ll get an idea of what gets read—and what gets ignored—as well as any ele­ments of the site that are cur­rently causing confusion.

The Alli­ance for Com­munity Trees web­site, before and after. The logo was retained, and we used the same basic colour scheme. The end result was that returning users didn’t feel as though they’d landed on some other site acci­dent­ally, and they wel­comed the change.

3. While you’re at it, ser­i­ously con­sider your branding.

If you’re redesigning your web­site anyway, it may be a great time to con­sider redesigning your logo and branding as well. A gor­geous, well-thought-out redesign is going to have lim­ited impact if your logo sucks. When redesigning, you often don’t neces­sarily want to rebuild everything from the ground up—you’re best off taking what’s there and subtly chan­ging it to make it better. A great way to do this is to change the struc­ture and graphic ele­ments, but retain the same (or sim­ilar) colour scheme and typo­graphy. This way, it won’t be so jar­ring to return vis­itors as it would be if you were to rebuild everything from scratch. Basic­ally, the more estab­lished your busi­ness is, the more estab­lished your branding will (or at least should!) be in your cus­tomers’ eyes. This means you’ll need to make more subtle changes to avoid ali­en­ating your cli­en­tele.  Realign, don’t redesign.

The DVD Edge web­site, how­ever, had a less estab­lished brand and a less strong logo, so we were able to play with the logo a bit. Keeping the overall image means that it’s still not such a dra­matic change, but redrawing it to be a little cleaner and more modern made it stronger.

4. Con­sider a CMS.

I feel like I extoll the vir­tues of Word­Press a lot, but it’s ser­i­ously fant­astic. If you’re already revamping your web­site, and you’d like a way to manage your con­tent more easily, I’d recom­mend get­ting the whole thing built in Word­Press (or another CMS that suits your needs). While you’re at it, you can also add a blog to the site, which is great for bringing in traffic, boosting search engine res­ults, building valu­able con­tent, and increasing con­ver­sa­tion with your users. Static web­sites are out. Web­sites you can update easily and quickly the moment someone sends you a glowing testi­mo­nial are in.

5. Work on your con­tent first.

I’m willing to bet that your con­tent could be better. If you can’t write it your­self, hire someone. Great con­tent is every bit as important as great design, and if you’ve already got great con­tent plotted out, a great designer will be able to work with it in order to make the whole thing come together nicely.

Fern­wood Pub­lishing went for a com­plete over­haul and a custom-build CMS, while they were at it. The end result is a sleek, easy-to-use web­site that allows them to manage their large inventory of titles.

Con­sider the voice of your website—too many sites read like bro­chure copy written ten years ago by someone with an MBA. If your audi­ence is other people with MBAs, that’s fine, but chances are, your audi­ence is just put off by buzzwords. If you speak to them in an honest and friendly way, you’ll find your audi­ence is much more receptive, engaged, and more likely to hand over their money to you.

6. Hire great people, and let them do their jobs.

Who you hire for the pro­ject is up to you, but I recom­mend at least a designer—obviously! A copy­writer and a stra­tegic con­sultant, as men­tioned earlier, will also be a great help. When you’re looking to hire someone, you obvi­ously want to be sure they’ve got a great web­site already. Unfor­tu­nately, while many people in the website-making industry suffer from pretty severe cases of “carpenter’s house”, their web­sites are the best way for you to determine their abil­ities. Past pro­jects, of course, are also quite telling, as are client testi­mo­nials. Once you’ve found someone that seems like they may be good, send them a few emails. Ask ques­tions. Make sure that they respond within a reas­on­able time­frame, answer your ques­tions to your sat­is­fac­tion, and know what they’re talking about.

Then, hire these great people. Send them your stra­tegic plans, your con­tent, everything you’ve already worked on—and let them build you some­thing great. Design is very much a col­lab­or­ative pro­cess, and a good designer should lead you through the pro­cess, keeping your goals in mind at all times, making sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Remember you hired these people for a reason, and you should be able to trust their pro­fes­sional guid­ance! If you allow the pro­cess to play out like a part­ner­ship, rather than a dic­tat­or­ship, you’ll find your­self with a much stronger end result.

And I recom­mend that you hire Trig­gers & Sparks.

As I men­tioned in last week’s post, I’m working on stream­lining a number of my pro­cesses. The most important, and I think accord­ingly the most com­plex, of these pro­cesses is that by which I develop web­sites, which is often some­thing of a mish­mash of various meth­od­o­lo­gies and tech­niques. Since I build so many Word­Press web­sites (and I do believe it’s magic), I’ve been focusing on devel­oping a sort of gen­eric tem­plate for Word­Press web­sites. This includes the theme itself (and its cor­res­ponding frame­works and depend­en­cies), but also a col­lec­tion of plu­gins that I use on every site. Akismet and All-in-one SEO Pack are so ubi­quitous as to be obvious, but I’ve been working on a list of others that are almost uni­ver­sally useful. Most of them improve upon the core func­tion­ality of Word­Press straight out of the box, and so demand very little from either user or designer.
Here’s my list (at least for today).
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Last week, I made an important, life-changing decision. One that I should have made years ago, but I’ve cow­towed to abuse for too long. From here on out, I will no longer be devel­oping web­sites that work in IE6.

I will, instead, be using the fab­ulous IE6 Update script on all of my web­sites. (There’s even a Word­Press plugin. It’s going to be so simple, it’ll almost be auto­matic. In fact, if you run a Word­Press site, could you just run out an install it, right now? I just did. It feels good.) I won’t even bother trying to check what I’ve cre­ated in IE6 any more (though I’ll admit I didn’t often).

According to Net­mar­ket­share, almost 17% of the internet still uses IE6. That’s utterly insane, given that IE6 is nine years old, three ver­sions out-of-date, and famed for being the scourge of the internet. If you’re bored one day, sit a web designer/developer—or whatever hybrid you prefer—down and men­tion IE6. I can almost guar­antee you’ll get a frus­trated or sickened face, and maybe a string of explet­ives, if you’re really lucky.

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Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent cli­ents, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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