MEDIA AND MARKETING – WEBSITE REVIEWS
So you’re thinking of changing
your website? Studio 44 investigates the potential reasons your club may have for redesigning your website. Have a read through to get an insight into when a redevelopment of your website may, or may not, be applicable!
W
e hear all sorts of reasons from our clients as to why they want their website redesigned, ranging from ‘my website isn’t responsive and doesn’t work on mobiles’ to the more advanced ‘my whole business has transformed and the current website just doesn’t fit’. Whatever your reasons, be sure that you have a good one because a website redesign is not something that you should just undertake for the sake of it, and to stomach the time and cost there’s got to be a tangible benefit at the end of the process - be it more members or just more efficiency. So what are some key reasons for wanting a redesign? • Responsiveness – The value of a good mobile browsing experience is not to be underestimated. Not only from a user perspective with users becoming more aware of good and bad mobile experiences, but also from a search engine perspective with Google cracking down on non-responsive sites! • A change of brand/new direction for your club – This is where a redesign is essential. Such a change means that not only will the whole website need to alter but the messaging and calls to action will also need to be re-thought. To try and shoehorn these into an existing website is almost certainly a mistake. The whole user journey is likely to be completely different and there’s nothing worse than having- for example – a new logo and colour scheme incorporated into a design that wasn’t built with it in the first place. • Stale and out of date – It’s usually vitally important to ensure your website is modern and cutting edge (although this is dependent on your target audience and membership). A young, energetic target audience will embrace a new site but an older, more set in their ways target audience may hate the new layout as the button they always clicked on has moved; so judge this reason on who you’re looking to target. • Poor performance – This is often a good reason for change. If your website is performing poorly and losing you members then you need to find out why,
as very small design tweaks on areas that have a clear call to action can often make a big difference to the amount of new people through the door of your club. Investigate this before deciding on a full blown redesign, but if something fundamentally isn’t working that can’t be easily changed then a redesign would be appropriate. • Website not aligned with business aims – This can either be a result of not getting your existing website aligned with business objectives when it was built, or the club changing and evolving. For example if you have a downloadable booking form on your website that visitors download and send in, you may want to look at taking this online as your club grows and evolves. In this instance having a booking system online can help scale your business as not only will the booking process become easier, the admin hassle of processing forms and payments will be greatly reduced as everything will be automated. • Keeping up with the competition – Another reason we often hear is people wanting to keep up with the competition, either because their largest competition has released a glamorous new website or because they have a few competitors that are always ahead of them in search engines. Keeping up with your competition is vital, but don’t forget that their new site you’re jealous of may not be ideal for your target audience so give a little time to see how they’re doing before following blindly down the same path. • It just doesn’t have that wow factor – Be careful with this one as this can often be very subjective and result in unnecessary change for change’s sake. It’s very easy to look at your own website all the time and fall out of love with it for no real reason. Unless you’re getting a lot of feedback from external people actually visiting your website then think carefully about this and possibly ask a group of impartial people for their thoughts. You may find that actually it’s just you who thinks the site doesn’t have the wow factor when in reality it’s very popular with those who matter. • Poor search engine performance – Poor search engine performance can lead to people thinking
they need a redesign. This is the reason most dependent on the quality of your site as it is. If your website is good visually, optimised for mobile devices and generally performs well but just doesn’t get enough traffic, work to optimise with what you have got as often a few tweaks to both the technical and content structure of the site can see big search engine improvements very quickly. • Out of date content management – Nowadays content management on the website is a given. Any CMS (content management system) worth its salt can give you control over what you want to manage on your website so if you don’t have a CMS that offers this, that’s often a good reason to change. Although value becomes a big factor here. What are going to be the tangible benefits of having improved content management? A club, for example that can’t update the events calendar on their website will hugely benefit from the improved performance and smart visual look of an interactive calendar, but a club that wants to manage the ‘about us’ page of their website will likely not get tangible benefits from moving their website to an improved CMS. So what to do? Well, whatever your reasons hopefully the above has given you some kind of insight into the benefits, or potentially otherwise of a redesign and if you are looking at overhauling your site make sure you think carefully about why and make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, not just the sake of it! Still not sure? Then have a chat with us. We’re the experts – it’s what we do. We can take a good look through all potential benefits and drawbacks of a redesign and advise on an appropriate solution, and on when (and if) to take action.
CONTACT DETAILS Studio 44 (a new company from the Larrytech team) designs and develops new websites to deliver real results, that are mobile friendly, optimised for Google and easy to update and manage. t. 01892 888 011 e. info@studio44.agency
CLUB REPORT 55
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