COMMENTS
I'm one of those marketing cats that insisted on a website redesign. But I was prepared to back it up. I understand the negatives to completely changing everything. Websites should constantly be evolving with content and new interesting ideas. Basic website components should remain the same. Except when they don't work. And that is precisely why my company needed a total redesign.
Those numbers seem shocking though.
We just redid our website...my idea and my work. Our website became out of date and needed a huge overhaul. The amount of time and money associated with the redo would have been a ton, so I started one as a side project. We launched it last week to work side by side of our old website on a different URL to make sure everything is up and running before we switch the URLs. I'm hoping the new site does a lot better now that everything has been updated.
I'm an officially trained "designer" and I find that we keep getting a bad rap. Half of what I learned in my degree was actually very interrelated with marketing - identifying the right target market, narrowing your message etc. In fact, I think you can't have one without the other. Marketing only enhances what I have learned, not replaces it.
A lot of my work now involves teaching clients who have hired me to redesign their site for SEO purposes why they need to invest more money into their website to focus on lead generation. My biggest challenge is getting customers to realize the value of creating an inbound marketing system with proper lead generation.
I hope that most of these redesigns were focused on that: smoothing the lead generation process.
P.S. (Why does everyone hate on the designers? I was not just trained to make things pretty.)
You polled 164 marketers. Is there any other criteria other than 'In House/Not Agency' such as geographic focus, company size, revenue etc?
Last year about this time I started the process of rewriting my website. Since I am the marketing department and the CEO I knew it was time for a new look and feel. It took us about 6 months to finish this side project. The designer I work with is awesome and since we are a database programming shop and an Internet /
email marketing firm at the same time it made it easy to manage the project.
Three of my major focuses for the website rewrite were the following:
1.
Design & Work flow. I recommend using a professional designer, someone who has had a professional education regarding designer, human factors and ergonomics.
2.
SEO structure - with a well though out plan regarding my money keywords and which pages would harness specific keywords and keyword strings from an SEO perspective.
3.
WOW my prospects Since my website is a search tool for marketing and media companies that buy and rent
email lists I knew that I needed an email search tool that would be far better than my competitors. We incorporated Google Maps API into our search scheme using Javascript and JQuery. The
search tool is the best on the Internet. As soon as we implemented the Google Search tool into my programming our site moved to PR5.
We are very happy that our site is part of 2011. Websites have changed drastically since early 2000. I believe that it is important to focus on design, human factors, seo, database driven functions and features. Incorporating the WOW factor with Google Maps on our site has made a big difference.
Although we update copy and make changes on the site, I don't suspect I will need to do a rewrite again for a couple / few years.
Our website has had the same basic design for over 5 years. We are just now re-designing it for two reasons. First we are bringing it over onto the Hubspot CMS and our current design did not fit too well with this tool.
Second and more important we came to the conclusion that the navigation we were using did not reflect the business as it has evolved and we are using the migration to the new platform to do a new design as well.
This will only be the third redesign in over 11 years for the site so I don't think we have been too caught up in the looks vs. the functionality.
What often looks "old" to us is actually fine or even wonderful to new readers and our clients.