Help – I Want To Redesign My Company Website, But Where Do I Start
Update: I added what I think might be my favorite site — Slicehost (and, yes, they are my current hosting provider).
I am in the market to redesign my company website.
A few months ago, I put version 1.0 of the Twin Roots website out to the public. It is based on a free template that I thought was interesting and relatively unique (for something that is free). But I knew all along that it was only a temporary stopgap until I decided I wanted to get serious and get a more permanent design for Twin Roots established.
Well that time has come, and you know what, I am as confused and perplexed as ever on where to begin. Here are some things I know:
- I am not a good front end or graphic designer. I have no shame in admitting that. Thus, that’s why I am looking around for a “3rd party” alternative.
- I am open to free templates, free templates that can be modified, paid templates, or a real life person doing the web design
- I am willing to pay money for the website design (whether template or web designer), but I am not willing to break the bank. For what I currently want, I have a top threshold price that I know I shouldn’t go over.
- I want a clean, crisp look (see below for examples of sites that I really like)
- I have no e-commerce need yet; this is currently a purely informational site
- I like my logo; simple, clean, yet unique. So I want that incorporated into the site.
But, where to start is actually quite mind boggling. There are an infinite number of template websites, tons of “Bid For Design” sites, many individual website designers offering their services (but whom I don’t know personally), etc. Do I use a WordPress CMS theme or something else? Many questions are running through my mind.
Here is what I found in my research:
- Site Designs I like: Slicehost, Datamartist, ReliableSite.net (no they are not my host), Kirix, Panopta, GoalComposer, MacRabbit (I get a lot of my impressions from the sites of the good people at the Business of Software forum).
- Templates: TemplateMonster, Open Source Web Design, WooThemes, Design Offers at WebhostingTalk
- Bid For Design: 99designs, DesignOutpost,
- Website Designers: Design Offers at WebhostingTalk, Craigslist
And I have just hit the tip of the iceberg.
Any advice on a sane, coherent process to get a new website for my company would be MUCH appreciated.
Thanks.
Hi Joel,
Glad you like our site design (kirix.com). We had an amazing graphic designer. He took our general mockup/specs and came back with stuff we could only have imagined creating ourselves. We took care of all the back-end stuff and implementation.
The main trouble was finding a graphic designer we liked. It took (literally) years going through various people/contests/etc before we found someone we really trusted, seemed to really know what we were looking for (and delivered accordingly).
If you’d like our designer’s contact info, just shoot me an email. I believe he’s reasonably priced for a quality graphic designer — but he’s obviously not going to come as cheap as a $100 online template.
Good luck!
Hi Ken!
Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point; how do you know which designer to choose if you plan to go with a human web designer. Word of Mouth is the best way — portfolio viewing is ok, but you need that first hand experience for verification.
I sent you an email as well…
Hi Joel,
I suggest you to keep below points in mind while redesigning your website.
1.) Make Sure that 301 redirects are in Place- You definitely don’t need to be an Einstein for knowing this but still I need to mention it as the first essential point here. Whenever you change the URL of your website, you must place 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL.
2.) Include Analytics Code on Every Page- most of the times, people forget to add analytics code to each page, however, this is crucial and must not be forgotten as this will provide you with information of what is going on your website. If you want to close your eyes about what’s happening in new website then no there is no need to check, simply install Google analytics code.
3.) Robots.txt and Sitemaps- These two component play a very vital role in the SEO this is because the Robots.txt notifies the search engine crawlers to not to crawl a certain page for the search engine results. Updating your new site with robots.txt and sitemaps will enable you to view your new site structure.
4.) Update Google Adwords- Before the site goes live it must be tested that the adwords tracking code still works on the new website’s pages. Google adds tracking parameters onto the URL and therefore, to track the activity within adwords it is necessary to update it.
5.) Review the conversion endpoints- Google Adwords has a certain conversion code on certain pages of your website and therefore, if you are using Adwords for gaining traffic then before the website goes live make sure that the new pages also contain that same conversion code.
6.) End to end test- this is one of the most important activity to perform when redesigning your website, a complete end to end test. It really doesn’t matter the amount of testing you have done previously but you definitely need to do this task again and may be for the last time before uploading your new website.
7.) Ranking reports- make sure that you prepare your ranking reports prior to redesigning and after redesigning as this will give you the fair idea about the success of your redesigning.
Hence, here are the essential points never to be missed while redesigning your website especially from the Search Engine Optimization point of concern.