'Web Design Help,Commentary'
How to set the right goals for your website redesign
27 JUL 2016 0
Goals.
Before you embark on a website redesign, you should sear that word into your mind. Goals make the difference between a great project that will generate value for you and your business, or a waffling effort that will generate activity, but few concrete results.
Now you may think you have a goal in mind already and that's great. But dig deeper. Make sure there is a solid focus and direction at the core of your efforts. You need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your redesign, not just be holding list of vague generalizations.
Here's a comparison to help spot the differences between bad goals and good goals.
Bad goals:
- We want the website to look fresh and attractive
- We want the site to tell people what we do
- We want the site to be easy to use
What I just listed above are good aspirations. I mean, yes, your site should definitely look attractive and new if you're paying for a fresh redesign! Of course you want customers to know what your business does when they visit the site and obviously a site should be intuitive and easy to use (I mean, what's the alternative, clumsy and difficult? Would anyone ever willingly consider that?)
Those are fine guidelines and standards, but they aren't goals. They don't drive action, they don't steer the site in one direction or another. Good goals should lay out a clear path of what the site's priorities should be, the things to focus on and build a redesign around.
Good goals:
- We want to sell more products
- We want to increase the total number of donations we receive
- We want existing donnors to make larger donations
- We want to reach out to new markets and increase our name recognition
- We want to explain a complex service succinctly
Setting concrete, and ideally measurable, goals before starting your redesign will guide and ground the entire effort. Good design comes from communication. Being clear from the get go about what you want to achieve will focus the task and guide your efforts.
Having positive, well-stated goals will influence every decision of a site redesign. What the homepage looks like. What info is brought over from the previous site, and what kind of things get left on the cutting room floor. It helps plot the forward trajectory of the site, answer questions like what kind of content should be developed, if you need a newsfeed, or separate landing pages for different products, membership databases, and so on.
Clear goals and specific intentions will result in something that adds value to your business. Setting vague or nebulous goals ends with vague and nebulous results. Start with a solid foundation and build from there.