Anatomy of a Website Redesign

We recently redesigned our website and I thought you might be interested in the reasons behind some of the choices we made.  Many of these may help you in evaluating your own website.   Functionality:  The first was the fact that the old site didn’t respond as well to mobile devices as we would like.  While it was responsive and technically mobile friendly, it was not user friendly on mobile devices.  This was a must for us, so that became our first goal. The second was the long page load and scrolling glitches.  This was due to the heavy amount of jQuery in the old design. To help with this, we had been relying on page caching and loading static content from a CDN, which we still do, but now on a much more manageable level. We decided to go for a much leaner site that would load quicker and scroll smoothly.   Design: Graphically, we were tired of our old design and wanted a site that was more minimalist in design, while being colorful and friendly.  We wanted to focus on circles, echoing the spyder ball in our logo, and of course, it had to showcase our purple!  You’ll find circles and purple all over the new site and we love it!  The site is easy to read and the colors pop. We opted to do away with the slideshow and use a slick call to action instead.  Studies conducted on these call to actions show that they achieve about 23% more conversions than other types.  We used a simple full screen background image of a person using a tablet to pull up a responsive website.  Then, we added a big purple button offering a free marketing analysis.   Then, we addressed the wide variety of services we offer.  Our old site had a main menu with a bunch of dropdown menus listing everything we do.  This was clunky in mobile, and we thought people might be distracted before they found what they were looking for.  We simplified the menu, using NO dropdowns, and simple, clear and easy to understand items.   Also, we decided to divide the services we offer into two categories:  design and marketing.  Then, we put them all right there on the home page, in two columns.  So right from our home page, you can go straight to whatever you are looking for.   Lastly, we added an introductory video and a chat feature.  The chat feature has been great, allowing people to ask questions right when they are on our site.  While there is a monthly fee for this, it’s more than out-weighted by the leads we’ve received. Search: We added several new search updates to improve our search engine ranking as well.  Actually, every site should have a complete search engine overhaul every year.  Things change, Google changes, and so must your SEO! We updated our on-page optimization then re-submitted our sitemaps.  We also updated our robots.txt file and htaccess file. All of these changes took a week or two to accomplish and yes, there were times when the site was glitchy during the process, but there was never a time it was down and the glitches were very short-lived.  We’ll check in later to see how well the new site is doing!