In the era of worldwide spread of the Internet came the realization of the fact that wars are no longer waged on the real world battlefields, but on the battlefields of virtual reality. That`s true while speaking not only about video games but it can also be applied to competitive wars among companies. There is no deny that practically every company now realizes that to win a battle on the virtual field means gaining your target audience`s attention and devotion and thus getting more and more profit.
Now the main issue arises of how to leave your competitors far behind on that virtual field?
More or less, but the fact remains a fact that in the virtual environment the company is represented by its website and its promotion in the Internet.
The website has already become a face of the company. Moreover, as it comes to a human`s complexion in order to look good you need to take care of yourself during all your lifespan. Does your face look tired and grey or is it shining and attracting attention? The same is about website.
The Internet is a dynamic and fast-developing environment and if you want to be everything your customers need, renovation of your website should become an essential part of your regular business process. The website can become out-of-date and outmoded even a few months after its launch.
The website should be up-to-date, popular, effective and visited and, if not, then time has come for its renovation. Website renovation can become a racking headache if not taking into consideration all important aspects and details. Once having done everything correctly, next time it will be a piece of cake to update your website.
Here are presented 7 steps to a stress-free website renovation which will ensure that renovation will make your website competitive and fit the latest market tendencies.
1) Make a review of your existing website
First, you need to make a thorough review of such components of your existing website as design and contents and to mark their strong and weak sides. You need to understand what exactly is to be changed and what is to be left the same. Does the website serve its goals? Is the design still up-to-date or looks like an old and shabby house? Does your website contain enough information or is the information excessive? Having answered these and many other questions you can get down to the renovation process.
2) Conduct your traffic analysis
There is no need to emphasize the importance of traffic analysis. It will not only let you evaluate how visited your website pages are but also help you understand from what online resources your visitors come. Having made the analysis, you will know what pages are of great interest to your visitors and what pages are to be altered and supplemented.
Traffic can be easily traced if you visit your statistics page which is located at your server at your hosting company. Nevertheless, you may also benefit from special traffic analysis tools as they will give you results on your customers` geographical location, their most popular search terms and so on.
3) Monitor website performance
In general, performance monitoring is an important aspect to pay attention to. A visitor can easily lose patience if some of your website elements do not function properly. Seeing the « Page Not Found » or « Server Not Available », your potential customer will definitely go to another website with no such problems. There may be some flash elements that do not open or it may take too long for the main page to load – all this may lead to creating a negative image of your company and losing your customers` trust and devotion.
It may be rather problematic for one person to test all functional elements of the website, so it would be less stressful to acquire special performance monitoring tools that will allow saving time on conducting website performance tests.
4) Renovate the contents
Having made the previous analysis, you can now get down to renovating the contents of the website. No need to say that most people are attracted by interesting and useful information they can find at different websites. Therefore, if your website will contain an interesting blog or smart and useful articles people will definitely visit your website, not anybody`s else. Moreover, by constantly adding new information to your pages, your website will go up and up at the search systems. No matter whether you place announcements of new products or services rendered, or an article on special deals or featured products – your website will turn up at the top of search and it will give you lots of benefits.
5) Create new features
It is true that the website will not be competitive without creating new features. Here one can definitely enumerate adding or removing a section, adding some new flash contents, creating a simpler navigation bar or a more perfect search system. Besides, it may also be essential to add some new ways of payments, to modernize content management system or even to create a possibility to integrate your articles into popular social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and vKontakte. Experts assume that without developing your features your website will definitely not be a success.
6) Introduce your renovated website to customers
It is undeniable that after renovation is over, time has come to introduce your new updated website to your customers and to see if it meets their expectations and if there is anything else that you have missed. With the help of feedback system, you will be able to collect all necessary information in a short period of time.
7) Evaluate the results
All in all, the final step will be to evaluate the results. Doubtless, evaluation should be conducted regularly after a certain period of time. While the first evaluation may be conducted after a week, the next one should take place in a month`s time. What is more, the final evaluation should be no later than in half a year`s time to make conclusions of what has been successful and what has been not.
All in all, not knowing a lot about website renovation, one may conclude that renovation of the website is definitely a long and thorny way. The steps presented above will definitely make the whole process of renovation clearer and thus simpler. If you clearly understand what is to be done and how it is to be done, then any process becomes less stressful.
Finally, once you have evaluated the results of the renovation and see how effective it has been, you will be more eager to keep it on. And even if it seems a great amount of work to be done, you can always turn to IT professionals who will definitely make you enjoy your time while they do all work for you.
Elinext Group web development projects:
Animalpetbook.com social network for pet lovers
Wallpainters.de interactive website with a digital wall of 155 km length
Tipstersworld.com web community for sports gamblers
Industries and Technology Areas:
Industries: software development
Technology Areas: web development, php software development, responsive web design
