Sure, you don’t like your current website design but what does the customer think? Here are a few other questions Management should debate before commissioning yet another website redesign:
What does our customer look at when they are on our website?
What sections are most important to them?
How long are they staying? Should that period be longer or shorter?
Are they finding what they came for?
Are they hitting our goal pages?
Does the website even have a defined goal?
What are the top performing sections?
What are the worst performing sections?
What’s the difference between the best and worst areas?
Have we a login section?
Do readers with login details perform better than casual browsers?
Why is that?
How many times do people have to visit our website before they buy/convert?
How long is the period from their first visit until they convert – hours – days?
What’s our plan for bringing those that exit before they convert back?
With this new redesign, do we think it will attract more readers?
How many more readers do we think it will attract?
What evidence underscores this assertion?
Come to think of it how are people finding our site?
What is the quality of the traffic that leads to our site, I mean does a particular referral website bring us a better grade of reader than Google would?
Where are most customers entering your site?
“The home page” you say – are we sure?
This single fact alone would influence how we redesign the new site.
And when they get to our site, is their journey smooth?
What’s the drop out rate on each section of a customer journey?
Have we setup a customer journey analysis funnel and it’s fundamentally broken; is that why we want a site redesign?
The internal search engine on our site…It’s fabulous at telling which pages have missing links and important customer information. Is it this feedback we’re using to redesign your new website?
And all of this off-site activity like Facebook, Pay Per Click ads, and YouTube activity – What on earth is it actually doing for the customer and is it helping our business?
So why are we redesigning the website AGAIN?
Proclaiming that a website needs a makeover because it doesn’t look good is valid but it’s a subjective argument, so if one person doesn’t like the design, they can argue with the other person that possibly does until a winner is declared.
Use evidence, hard facts and historic data to inform your web strategy. That’s not subjective and can’t be contradicted. Building a web strategy on facts, goals and predetermined KPIs always makes for a more successful digital strategy. It also makes for much clearer instruction when briefing designers and results in much more creativity as less time is spent unraveling ambiguity.
At iON we make evidence based, data driven, factually accurate analysis of what your customer wants and your business needs online. Best of all, we present you with a clear non-technical marketing analysis and we even do the pretty pictures bit too. 
Need a quick steer on your digital strategy analysis? Call Yolanda or Niall on 02890 455911
Follow the author on twitter: