Website Redesign How to Step 1: The Website Audit

The first step in a website redesign, a website audit, is crucial for helping you determine the direction that you want your new website to take. It can also help you discover the problems that your site is currently experiencing and help you determine where you rank compared to your competition.  A website audit can be performed by your own marketing team (depending on its experience/size), but ideally it should be done by a web consultant, a web designer, or both.

The goal of a website audit is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your site and to determine what changes need to be made. A comprehensive audit should look at the site’s design, content, programming, structure and SEO.

Sometimes a website assessment checklist, like the one we created for our customers can help you keep track of all of the different aspects of an audit like those listed below.

There are several things that a website audit should help you establish including:

1. How to improve your website’s information architecture, accessibility compliance, layout and navigation for an enhanced customer experience.
2. How your website’s design is affecting your SEO strategy. Discovering the mistakes your current designer/developer has made that could be affecting your rankings or possibly blocking your website from being indexed by search engines is important for the optimization of your redesigned site.
3. Whether your site is compatible with multiple browsers. Depending on how long it’s been since your last audit or redesign, your website may no longer be compatible with some newer browsers or make the most of common screen resolutions and web technologies. 
4. The effectiveness of your content. A website audit should establish, from a user’s perspective, how relevant your content is. While you may understand the message you’re trying to communicate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will.
5. Your site’s current support of your brand. It is integral for your overall business strategy for you to know how well your brand is defined, how consistent your brand is across your site, and how clearly your brand message is communicated.
6. The strength of your conversion tactics. How successful are your calls-to-action? The audit should assess the copy for calls-to-action on your pages, the performance of your products and services and your conversion rates.
7. The quality of your participation in social media. Is your site social media friendly? The way that you approach social media can greatly affect your overall web presence and how you are perceived by your target audience.
8. How you stack up compared to your competition. Potentially the most important part of your website audit, a competitive comparison should help you establish which of your competitors has the most successful web presence and why.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at April 19, 2010 11:30 AM

Comments

Website Redesign

Hello,

Very nice and useful post especially for new comers and freelancers, moreover 3rd point mentioned in post is very important.