You can’t just build a website, shut it & forget it. You do need to maintain your website regularly in order to get desired results from it. Sometimes, you may even need to redesign your website completely.
But the question is “when is the right time to redesign a website?”. Below are some of the scenarios when you must revamp your website:
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- When your website looks outdated.
- If your website is not responsive for mobile phones and other smart devices.
- When most of the features of your website do not work.
Now that you know when is the right time to redesign your existing website, let’s have a look at the 5 major steps involved in website revamping.
#1 Web design
The first step in revamping any website is to create its design. Perhaps one of the most important reasons to revamp any website is to get a new look.
Your web designer can assist you to create proposed layouts for your new website and seek your suggestions & feedback on them.
You can choose any one of them that you like most and also add your own feedback so that your designer can make the required changes to it and send it back to you for your final review.
Here are some tips to work with your website designer to create a design:
- Send him reference websites to check and get some ideas.
- Draw a rough sketch and send it over to him.
- Send your corporate brand ideas to your designer to come up with a layout accordingly.
Once the layout is confirmed & finalized, you must ensure that you’ve taken all the source files (eg. PSD files) from your website designer.
Most of the business owners don’t take the source files and as a consequence, they face issues when they need to make some changes in the existing website design.
Don’t let this happen to you. Do ensure that you have secured all the source files from your website designer.
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#2 Content sitemap
After completing the website design, the next step is to prepare the content sitemap so that your website builder can develop the website accordingly.
Don’t just start the development work immediately after finishing your website design. Instead, take some time and work out the content planning for your website.
While creating your content sitemap, you can define various sections that you want to include in your website like:
- About us
- Services
- Products
- Blog
- Newsletter subscription
- Email auto-responders format upon forms submission
- FAQ
- Testimonials
- & other sections that may apply to your website
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#3 Web development
Once you create the content sitemap, you can then send it to your website developer along with the source files of your new design.
With the help of your content sitemap, your developer will get a clear idea of how to build your website so that it accommodates all of your content.
Web development is perhaps one of the most crucial steps of a website redesign process.
Why web development phase is more important?
In this step, you need to decide upon the development platform or CMS that you will use for your website development. While choosing a reliable CMS to create your website, here are a few things that you must consider:
- Your CMS must allow you to manage your website’s content & images easily so that you don’t need to hire a web developer and pay him for every minor task.
- Your CMS must be secured enough.
- Your CMS must be SEO-friendly so that you have a higher chance of positioning your website on search engines.
- Your CMS must be flexible & scale-able so that you can expand your website along with your growing business down the road.
Based on our experience of more than 10 years, we can strongly recommend using WordPress for your website development. You can find all of the above-mentioned qualities in WordPress.
Also, you must ensure that you hire an affordable website builder to save your money because website development is not a one-time thing.
You will definitely need to invest more money into your web development for scaling up the features of your website in the future. So, instead of spending all of your money together, you must plan to spend it over time, as and when required.
You can also consider hiring a web developer in India who can help you not only get an affordable website but can also work with you in long term to maintain & upgrade your website.
#4 Testing
You shouldn’t make your website live immediately after your web developer has completed his job.
Instead, you must test it thoroughly for all the features and ensure that there are no functional bugs in your website.
Here are some of the important checkpoints that you must go through while testing your website:
- Check for mobile responsiveness
- Check for loading speed
- Check for functional bugs
- Check for form submissions
- Check for form validation
- Check for browser compatibility
- Check for image quality
- Check for broken links
- Check for grammar & spelling mistakes in the content of your website
- Check for necessary tags like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, Google Remarketing, etc.
#5 Website Maintenance
Last, but not least step of any website redesign process is to ensure its website maintenance.
Just like your car, lawn, or health, your website needs regular maintenance too. In the absence of regular maintenance, your website may face serious issues like:
- Security threats due to outdated CMS version.
- Malfunctioning of some of the features due to outdated plugins & modules.
- Slow loading speed due to excessive addition of plugins, contents, and images.
- Broken links due to removal or renaming in some of the web pages.
Again, in order to save money, you can go for an affordable web maintenance package in India.
