If you’re reading this, it’s likely you are in the middle of a website relaunch. Am I right? There are three high level things to keep in mind to deliver a successful website for your audience.
The following steps will help ensure the relaunch of your website will deliver results:
1. Plan the new User Experience (UX)
Planning out the new experience you want your visitors to have is very important. As you likely already know, here are some of the critical steps to designing a great User Experience:
Research
• Understand your website visitors
• Understand your competitors
• Discover the latest effective website tactics
Outline
• Current pages and features
• Objectives for new website
• New pages and features
Design
• Design website wireframes
• Design style-tiles
• Design front-end experience
Chances are you’re already past the point, so onto the development stage!
2. Develop the stunning new website
Whether you are working with a website design and development marketing agency, or designing the website with your in-house team and hiring an external developer, it’s important to work with experienced professionals who use the right Content Management System (CMS) and that the front-end User Experience is executed well.
When choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) to build the back-end of the website on, make sure it will serve your organizations needs. CMSs like WordPress and Drupal offer the most flexibility to use shared resources and tools from an Open Source community of individuals.
When it comes to the front-end development, be sure the developers utilize the best practices and the most recent methods. This will help ensure a high level of compatibility with the increasingly large landscape of user’s browsers and devices.
If you’re already past the point, next is one of the most critical!
3. Plan to attract and engage new visitors!
There’s nothing worse for a user than to visit a website that is purely focused on promoting a product or service, even if it is pretty to look at. Expecting every visitor to be ready to buy your product the first few times they’re on your site is a lot like expecting someone to get married on a first date. This is why it’s paramount that you carefully plan for a steady stream of content.
The content on your site extends beyond the information pages about your product or service’s features and benefits. It should include a large amount of valuable content such as blog articles to help people find your website when searching online. After all, all Google has to index is the content you actually have on the site. So use that as an opportunity to attract your ideal visitors. A methodology to both attract your desired visitors as well and convert them to leads is called Inbound Marketing.
Develop a professional plan to discover who your ideal visitors are (Buyer Personas), what questions they have in mind throughout their process (Buyer’s Journey), what words they type in Google and search engines when researching (In-Depth Keyword Research), and what content they will find value in (Content Outlining).
Read this article on how to do so: How to Attract More Leads with Responsify’s Inbound Strategy
Final words of website relaunch advice
It takes a lot to pull off a successful website launch. Launching a fresh new website is important for any organization to make the right impression with existing visitors. Even more importantly however it’s absolutely critical that you have ‘customer-centered’ content ready to deploy along with your new website relaunch, so you can consistently feed Google new content to index and increase your domain and page ranking.
Setting up a strategy for truly engaging and valuable content to attract and convert your ideal visitors and customers is not an easy task to do while juggling a relaunch. Simply avoiding this will prolong the inevitability that people want to engage with content on your website, and not having a plan and content developed will slow down any progress you’ve made updating a website.
We’ve helped countless teams develop a Content & Inbound Strategy on the sidelines, while a site is being redesigned and built, so they can ensure their new site is successful, and not waste valuable time getting new people to their site organically from Google search.
If you’d like to read more, check out our eBook about how to Leverage Customer-Centered Content, and how to begin to plan your targeted content before your website relaunch.
If you have any questions about how to get started with an Inbound Strategy so you can start attracting new visitors to your website, don’t be shy, reserve a time to discuss strategy here. We’re here to help!
