Redesigning your website won’t make you more money.

Spending thousands of pounds on redesigning your website won’t make you more money or convert more customers unless you test the impact. Products that go on supermarket shelves always go through market testing so what makes you think a website redesign is any different? People have different tastes and you may put off more people than you attract, so don’t risk it for the sake of vanity.

Don’t believe everything a web design company tells you.

Most web design companies selling redesigns aren’t interested in the bigger picture, such as your search engine optimisation or your long term marketing strategy – they’re only interested in making money from a redesign. Their sales staff work on a commission basis, and their designers will almost always push one of their designs rather than a design that will attract new customers and enquiries, so bear this in mind before you fork out expensive design fees.

Learn from the mistakes of others – a true story!

A client contracted a web design company to redesign their website but it had disastrous consequences, which saw their site drop from the search engines and all their enquiries disappear over the course of a single week. The web design company responsible for the redesign had replaced the clients’ website with a “Joomla” based content management system, renaming their existing pages and removing all of the on page optimisation they had done previously. The bill for redesign cost £4500 with the client losing £3000 in online sales over the same week. On top of this, the client had to launch an emergency adwords campaign of £2000 to cover the period where the site dropped from the rankings leaving them out of pocket by £9500. Even after the original site was reinstated their rankings took over 4 weeks to reappear in the search engines, during which, the company lost several thousand pounds in online sales.

Note: 40% of all our new clients who came to us in 2009 describing drops in enquiries and sales were as a direct result of their websites being redesigned.

The moral of the story is this;  if you have an existing business website that earns you enquiries and sales, then do not redesign until you have assessed what you could lose!

Tweak your way to success with conversion optimisation and split testing.

Tweaking your website with small changes over a few months is far safer and can save you thousands of pounds in design fees and lost sales. This method is known as conversion optimisation. It involves making small changes such as changing the colour of a button, adding a form, changing page header and asking asomething the right way.

Read about how conversion optimisation is done.

Each time a change is made, the effects on orders and sales are measured in a process called split testing. The best performing changes are kept and the process begins again; increasing your sales!

After a few months your site will have changed from what it was into something new and beautiful that makes you more sales. Best of all the small changes are very cheap to achieve.

If you want to know more about conversion optimisation then give us a call.