This Phrase Is The Kiss Of Death For Your Website Redesign

‘Just Be Creative’.

Marketers, web developers, and graphic designers shudder at this commonly-delivered phrase in meetings with clients. There’s nothing wrong with creativity in design of course, and you want your website to stand out from the sea of other similar companies and organizations. The problem is not with the idea of being creative, it’s in the focus on uniqueness and creativity over strategy and user experience. ‘Just be creative’ leads the web development team and the client down a path that has no strategic goal, and is one of the biggest website redesign mistakes you can make.

Before undertaking a website redesign, there are many factors that your organization should consider. Notice that the actual design is at the end of this list for a reason: the design should work toward achieving the strategic plan that you’ve laid out and should support your goals. If you focus first on the ‘pretty pictures’, you’ll end up trying to fit your strategy into a specific design, and you’ll lose sight of the path to reach your goals.

Redesigning Your Website in 2016? View These Must-Have's.

Redesigning Your Website in 2016?

Considering a website redesign this year? It’s a great time to invest in a new website; there are more options available to you at a lower expense than ever before.

Technology, and more specifically, open-source platforms, have paved the way for organizations to incorporate complex elements into their websites that would have required thousands of dollars in custom coding in years past.

Now you can focus on creating the best user experience for your visitors, and leading them toward your goals, instead of spending time trying to build custom elements from scratch.

Here are the must-have’s (and a few nice-to-have’s) for your website in 2016, broken down by the internal systems you should have in place and the external elements that your visitors will interact with:

How to Choose the Best Firm for Your Website Redesign

How to choose the Best Firm for your Website Redesign

Getting into a relationship with a website design & development firm involves quite a bit of thinking ahead to the future of your organization, your goals and objectives, and your overall vision.

Often, we find that organizations will choose a design firm based on the fact that they’ve built a website for a competitor or another company they respect, or they choose the lowest bidder without considering the long-term costs associated with having to make big changes later, or the opportunity costs associated with growing at a slower pace than they would have with a better-performing website.

So before you sign that project agreement for your new website, be sure to ask these questions of the firm you’re considering working with:

Designing Your Healthcare Website – Important Factors to Consider

Designing Your Healthcare Website

For the healthcare industry, the design of, and content within, your website could be the deciding factor between a prospective client choosing you for their needs over your competitors.

For health service providers in fields such as prosthetics, plastic surgery, stem cell storage and treatment, spinal health, birth and women’s health, physical and occupational rehabilitation, addiction treatment, and the thousands of others who operate outside of the traditional model, it is crucial to attract and engage with prospective clients as they conduct research on providers for their needs.

The problem is, many providers offer the same industry jargon in their content, the same generic stock photos, and the same uninspired taglines as most of the other providers in their field.

As a health services provider in a competitive industry, does your website stand out from your competitors? Does it really tell your story to a prospective client the way you would tell it to them in person at their first visit? Is it warm and engaging? Do you gather any information from visitors to help you understand what they’re looking for, and do you provide them exactly what they’re looking for? Most importantly, is it easy for visitors to get exactly what they need from your website?

Questions to Ask Before Your Website Redesign

Questions to Ask before your next Website Redesign

Every few years, most businesses and organizations see a need for some form of website redesign. In the past 5 years, much of the momentum for updating websites was due to a need to convert those that weren’t mobile-friendly to a responsive design, making them mobile-friendly across all devices and dimensions.

If your website isn’t responsive to all mobile devices yet, read Melissa’s article in the NH Business Review to learn why this is so important: ‘Mobilegeddon’ and Your Site.

Before you jump straight into conversations with your team about the new features, content, and graphics you’d like to incorporate into your website, I’d urge you to take a step back and consider the questions below. We find that many organizations go right into the planning phase of their website redesign without properly considering all of the implications and opportunities that exist.

Here are some important questions to ask yourself, your team, and your web development firm: