Website Redesign How to Step 2: Website Design

The actual design of your website is obviously one of the most important aspects of a redesign, but it isn’t just about having an eye-catching, appealing site.

Your website’s design should capture your visitors’ attention while at the same time, supporting your web marketing and business objectives; ensuring that your site is fully compatible with different browsers; scaling so it can grow with your company; and enhancing your site’s usability. When done correctly, your website design can help improve your company’s credibility and get more visitors to convert into leads.

A large part of a designer’s job is to understand your company, and then to find a way to reflect what they’ve learned into a layout that delivers results. When designing a layout to suit your company, the designer will work hard to understand the message you’re trying to present and will translate that into the site’s overall look and feel, usability, and scalability. When designing a website, a designer will look at three major aspects of the layout:

1. Overall Look and Feel: This is the part of the website that creates the visual appeal. This aspect of the design represents your brand and should be cohesive across your entire site. The look and feel will help to give your visitors’ their first impression of your brand, and should reflect how you want them to perceive you. To help determine this, a designer will look at the examples you’ve brought them, and try to understand your company’s objectives for the site. By understanding who you are as a brand, your target audience, and what appeals to you from other sites, a designer should be able to create a template for you that represents your brand accurately.


2. Usability: This is a crucial aspect of the site’s design because it will affect the way that visitors navigate your site. A well organized layout should help customers find what they are looking for in an intuitive way. By focusing on the information architecture, a designer should be able to guide visitors to the areas of the site you want them visit, and at the same time help them to easily locate the information that they need. Complicated navigation makes it difficult for visitors to explore your site, and if they can’t find the information they are looking for easily they will most likely click away to a competitor’s site. When meeting with a designer, it is their job to help manage your expectations between look and feel, and usability. While you may want the most attractive “flashy” site you can get, a designer should help you understand how they can find a happy medium between the visual appeal of your site and its usability. 


3. Scalability: A good designer will always be designing your site for the future needs of your company. Most companies with an active web presence have realized that content management is an essential aspect of their web strategy. As a result, proactive designers should encourage you to redesign your site based on a content management system (CMS), if it isn't already. Websites, especially those that use a CMS are very organic and so the design needs to be able to scale as you add content and develop  your communication and messaging. You want your website to be designed as a platform for evolving content and ideally a designer will model your site with the capabilities of your content management system in mind so that you have ease of maintenance and your site can grow and evolve in cohesion with your content creation. 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at April 21, 2010 8:00 AM

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