Just in case you were wondering, the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" shouldn't be applied to your website design.
Here's why: your website essentially begins to break the moment you launch it. It's like driving a new car off the lot – the second you hit the highway, the car loses 20% of its value.
This isn't a pessimistic take or anything like that; it's simply the state of doing business in our increasingly digital world. Tactics, design trends, and most significantly, usability testing requirements dictate its best practice to iterate your website and its improvement in usability as frequently as you can.
We recently redesigned and migrated our WSIWorld website; with that decision in mind, here are the reasons why it's important to iterate your website's design and UX regularly.
The Digital World Moves Fast
Perhaps the biggest reason not to let your website's design and UX stagnate is the speed at which the digital landscape moves. We do business in a world that changes fast – faster than most of us can even keep up with – and with that comes the need to quickly adapt user efficiency, strategies, and tools that we use. What worked in the digital world two years ago probably doesn't work the same way today. So as good as your website looked and functioned two years ago, it's old for all proportion of users in today's digital world.
Practice What You Preach
For us, redesigning our website and its UX is part of a business goal dedication to "practice what we preach" or "drink our own champagne." We say that we help businesses do better marketing, and to do that, we need to have our own ducks in a row. As we've discussed, in 2019 and beyond, it's important to iterate your website's design and UX regularly. So that's what we've done: we've completely revamped our website and UX. We're really proud of the new site, so please, have a look around and let us know what you think!
Follow The Numbers
In the digital marketing world, numbers and data are hugely important. As soon as you visit any website, you also begin collecting data on it. And unless you've somehow built the perfect website, that data is immediately going to tell you those specific components of your site that are not working optimally. Whether that's because users are behaving differently than you thought or a design element isn't as engaging as you hoped doesn't really matter. Once your site has been live for a few months, dig into the data, and you'll quickly have a list of things to work on for the site's next iterative design process.
Optimize Your Website Design
Sometimes, you just can't see the finished product until a project is launched. This is part of the reason why we'd instead ship something imperfect and iterate rather than waiting for perfection, but that's a post for another day.
While creating the new WSIWorld, we: a) analyzed data on our legacy website, b) considered modern design and UX trends, c) audited our content and SEO strategy, and d) really honed in on our customer personas. As a result, here are some rules of thumb we came up with, which you can use if you're thinking about a website redesign of your own:
Don't Make Your Visitors Think
Giving your website visitors too many things to think about or too many places to look or click causes cognitive friction. So when users are overwhelmed by a design decision on a website, what do they most often do? Click back and try something else – otherwise known as a bounce.
This is why, on the homepage of your website – above the fold – you should try to tell your website visitors a) who you are, b) what you do, and c) why they should trust you. While it might seem challenging to do all of this in such a small space, it's a major goal to put the time and effort into optimizing this information.
Avoid "Greedy Marketer Syndrome"
Picture this: you've got a new website, and you're excited. You want to reap the benefits of all that hard work as soon as possible. So you launch the site and can't wait to get that first conversion. Sound familiar?
As tough as it is, we recommend avoiding "greedy marketer syndrome." The fact is, we shouldn't really want or expect our website visitors to take the bottom-of-the-funnel conversion action right away. Instead, we should earn their trust and allow them to make their own decision without being overly pushy.
This is why, for example, we chose to go with "Talk To Us. We Can Help." as our main CTA button text instead of something like "Book A Consultation Now!"
Conduct Post-Launch Analysis
We'll close this post out by saying don't forget to conduct a user experience analysis once you've rolled out the new site and UX. There will be immediate data, so why not use it? Heatmaps and A/B tests can give you insight into how users are engaging and what they're clicking on – maybe you can even make some improvements in usability to your website design right away.
Good luck, and be sure to reach out if you have any feedback on the brand new WSIWorld!
