It’s a common misconception that all the work done on an online project ends with its launch date. Indeed, that’s enough to get your project going and to start attracting visitors, however, this is only just the beginning. If you want to stay relevant, websites must undergo regular re-evaluation and re-design. Sometimes it’s even necessary to completely change things up if you are having issues with drawing visitors and facilitating the ideal digital environment for any visitor browsing your website. Even if the changes aren’t drastic, they could be crucial in boosting popularity and traffic.

What about all the functionalities that you could still add? How about those you can improve to give your online project the edge it needs to stay ahead of the competition? You wouldn’t want to miss every opportunity, and luckily even after the website has been launched, you could still make the necessary changes to it to reflect a grander vision.

In our latest HostArmada blog post, we’ll be diving deep into the process of retrofitting your website to upgrade and improve it, so keep on reading if we’ve caught your attention!

Evaluating your online project

Knowing your product or service is a big bonus. All it takes is to know where your buttons or pages will lead the visitor. You also have to know where exactly to look for these buttons. If you can’t remember where to locate them and what your pages’ content is, then how would you expect your visitors to remember? Here’s an exercise that you can do to help you evaluate your website and get to know it better. Take a step back and go through all of it. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you do this:

• How is the website’s loading time?
• How easy is it to navigate the website and locate what you are looking for without prior knowledge of its structure?
• Does the design of the website appear aesthetically pleasing?
• Is everything working as intended?
• Could more be added to the website to improve it?
• What would you change and how if you didn’t have to worry about the technicalities?
• Can the whole of the website represent your vision for it, or could it be even closer to what is imagined?

While you are at it, you can even get a family member or a friend to look over the website as well and give them a specific task to perform. If they are successful relatively easy and have good things to say about their experience, then your website is on the right path. You can ask that person the very same questions that we suggest that you ask yourself during personal evaluation.

When to re-design your website?

Your website is like your digital child, and we understand that. It probably must have taken hours of conceptualization and dev work to birth this baby into existence. Whether you agonized hard over color choices and photos. Paid exorbitant amounts of money to a developer. Or trudged your path through help books and informative webpages to do it yourself; we are reasonably sure that the whole of it was pretty harsh!

The very idea of restarting this process all over again can be exhausting to any person, even a developer. Regardless of that very same fact, having a site that doesn’t quite hit the mark with visitors is an unwise choice. Not only in relation to the aesthetic qualities of your online project but also as a decision affecting conversion rate opportunities and your overall return on investment.

These are some of the reasons for needing to re-design your website or at least one or some of its pages, especially your homepage:

• The website has a higher bounce rate than the average.
• Initial load time is longer than 3 seconds.
• It lacks new and fresh content.
• Mobile devices experience issues with your website.
• There is difficulty in navigating the website’s content and functionality.
• Your website’s design doesn’t match the brand.
• You’ve got dead links on the website.

Trust us when we say that if your website isn’t showing a yearly growth in visitors and popularity, it is likely that it is long overdue for a complete overhaul!

Tips and Tricks for Website Design

When creating a website, one should consider it a work of beauty and a form of function. The individual elements have to work together seamlessly. A beautiful website draws in visits and gets more gain from each one. It’s hard to advise on website design because there are many methods and different solutions to the needs and requirements of the online project. And any opinions about design are subjective. What one person likes, another might find hideous. Still, there are some universal and practical tips and tricks that we can share with you to help out. The alchemy of website design is the art of blending the different aspects of the website to multiply their effect.

Online project retrofitting

Enough talking about the subject and let’s present things in a much clearer way!

These are the tips and tricks:

• Establish a clean and simplistic design by eliminating clutter and modernizing the elements of your website so that they serve their purpose, whether it is function or aesthetic.
• Scrolling is faster and easier than clicking. That’s why you should do your best to avoid tabs and overlapping graphical elements like carousels, accordions, and sliders.
• Always strive to create easy-to-read pages by paying heed to the font’s readability, having good contrast between your text color and background color, and the style of writing used for the website’s content.
• Remember that whitespace is your friend rather than your enemy because it will help you guide your visitor’s attention and showcase what is important.
• Use effective visual cues to direct visitors to your website’s right places and make sure that they don’t miss the key elements you’d like to present.
• Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly to increase the potential pool of visitors and make use of the fact that many people are on their phones daily.
• Using visual hierarchy as an essential principle of your design work will help display your content visually pleasing and efficiently.
• You can provide polls, infographics, or interactive graphical elements with a content-based value which can help you increase the interest and improve the readability of on-page information.
• Supplying social proof, reviews and testimonials will build trust for your brand and greatly help your online project.
• Have more than just a pretty site because appearance is essential in design, but functionality and ease-of-use make visitors come back again.
• The web design should strive to fulfill the end-user’s needs and the aesthetic style tailored to match your target audience.

Improving your visitors’ experience

The user experience is crucial to the long-term success of any product or service. If you’ve had a bad experience with a hotel, you’ll know just what we mean. Websites are no exception to this rule. To keep working on this goal, you’ll have to find ways to receive feedback directly from your visitors or from test groups that you run. By following the people’s will, one can discover a better way to use excellent website design explicitly inspired by the online project’s needs and requirements. Most of which are constantly changing with the times. Innovation on this end never truly stops if you want to make sure that you keep up to date with the changes in technology and website design standards.

So what’s the most likely method to improve your visitors’ experience with your website? It’s the call to action. Every page on your website, ideally, needs at least one clear, compelling call to action. A call to action is a form, link, graphical element, or button that helps users take the next step to get to what they’d like to see or do on your website. This can be a link to your services webpage from your homepage or as an offering of an online scheduling tool that allows visitors to book an appointment.

To sum it up, a good visitor experience would mean that the user visited your website, scrolled through the different pages, understood what the website is all about, and finally, got what they wanted.

Tell your Story

Whether you are running a small or big online business or run your website just as a hobby, it is vital to have a page dedicated to telling your story. They go by the various names: “About,” “Story,” “Mission”. These pages generally serve the same fundamental purpose of telling your visitors who you are and what your online project’s all about as a whole. It is the go-to spot where visitors get to decide if you’re what’s right for them. If you fill it up with social proof, testimonials, user-generated content, interviews, and reviews, you’ll be giving your online project much-needed credibility.

How should you do it?

How should you best approach this? It is highly essential to be both honest and creative. Don’t try to sound formal if that is not the style of your brand. Consistency is critical here, and you must carefully consider how you want the world and your visitors to view you and all that you seek to accomplish with your online project.

Here is what you should consider when it comes to creating a proper “About Us”-style page:  

• Remain consistent with the style of your brand.
• Don’t be afraid to get personal because it is an excellent way for visitors to connect with your story.
• Try to give it the human touch and avoid sounding robotic, neutral, or apathetic.
• Regardless of how good you, your content, your online project, or your product is, remember that nobody likes too much arrogance or boasting.
• Ensure to provide calls to action and a contact link to stimulate further engagement with your visitors.
• Include the past, present, and future of your online project so that your visitors can see your personal journey.
• Get to know the audience you are writing for, so you’ll have a better idea about choosing the style of writing that you should use.

Finding the right CRM for your online project

What is CRM? CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRM systems are all about providing a way for online projects to store customer and visitor data, track interactions, and share this information with colleagues.

It allows online businesses to manage their relationships with customers, helping them to grow and expand. CRM technology has been available and widely embraced by the modern online business world. And for a good reason! If you’d like to take your website to the next level in its interactions with your visitors or customers.

With so many options for CRM available, choosing which one will be the ideal solution for you can seem like a daunting task. How can you possibly identify the right one for you? Do you even need to have one? If you are planning to run an e-commerce website or provide paid services, then the answer is a yes.

We will share some guidelines to help you with this:

• You have to clearly define and identify your goals to figure out what CRM’s functionality would serve your needs best.
• Try out a demo of the CRM service first to get an idea of how it would suit your online business.
• Always review compatibility with your design and software because this could make or break your website.
• Figure out how the implementation will work because you wouldn’t want to be unable to use the CRM you’ve invested your time and money in.
• Make sure to consider if your team would use it effectively or require additional training to do so.

Conclusion

Retrofitting your website could give it a much-needed upgrade that will pay off for you in the short and long term. It’s our sincere intention that you would be able to get some help from this blog post. When our customers are able to improve their online projects we also benefit! This is what is referred to as mutual prosperity, so it is in our best interest to provide as much help as possible.

If you have any questions, suggestions or concerns feel free to reach back to us at any time. HostArmada remains ready to be deployed 24/7!