Everyone wants to make their website better, but how do you actually go about doing so? When everything is working “fine”, it can be hard to get yourself to embark on any radical improvements. By thinking about your company, your customers, your competitors, and your aspirations, you can get a better sense of where your website is now, and where it needs to be.
1. Re-analyze your needs.
Any kind of meaningful improvement should come not from a random idea or the “need to get a new website”, but from purposeful analysis of what your company needs and how the current website is not fulfilling. When doing this, think about involving people from your company who you may not typically involve in website design, as sometimes they can have revealing ideas about how the website should function.
When you’re thinking about how your new site should function, put budget out of your mind during the brainstorming phase—it’s easier to make an extensive list of features that you can then prioritize and select from, than it is to always question ideas they come up due to their implementation costs.
2. Think about your users.
You may want to hold your assumptions in check here. Have you ever taken an in-depth look at your website analytics, to see what your users are actually doing on your site? That’s one way to approach a more educated website overhaul.
Another thing you may want to consider is just asking your customers for their input. Whenever you’re on a bigger company’s website, and particularly after you complete a purchase or interact with customer service, you may have noticed requests to fill out a survey. As long as the survey is quick and you make this clear at the time you ask for the customer’s time, you should get a decent completion rate, and you can get some key questions answered.
3. Assess your competitors.
Always think about your website in context with other companies in your industry. Since you last made updates, have any of your competitors added significant functionality or design elements that you want to incorporate into your own site? Because you may not be familiar with everything your competitors are doing, it’s not a bad idea to have someone at your company do an exploratory survey of competitor sites and take notes on any differences in design or functionality.
4. Think for the long term.
You probably only get to think about the design of your website every so often. Are you planning to make any big changes in your company’s direction in the next 2-3 years? If so, now is the time to build in capacity in your site, so that you don’t have to think things from the ground up later. For example, if you’ve been thinking about adding new product or service lines, add that functionality now rather than doing it on short notice and as an added expense down the road.
CanSpace Solutions has been trusted for over 15 years by Canada’s largest corporations and government organizations for providing reliable, affordable, and lightning-fast hosting solutions. Have a question about what’s possible for your site? Get in touch with us today!
