As you are here, you probably must e planning for a website redesign. Maybe your website is outdated, or it has poor engagement ratio, or perhaps it’s not just getting the work done.

Website Design is often misunderstood to be the way your website looks but that is a very small part of the picture. As Steve Jobs rightly said: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”

Websites are probably one of the most important assets for any company be it B2B or B2C but still, a lot of enterprise website redesigns fail.

Over the last few years, we have talked to actual business stakeholders and enterprise design companies to understand the significant reasons for redesign failures so that your company doesn’t have to face the same.

• Core Focus on Aesthetics:

  It’s not just about the UI (User Interface), It’s also about the UX (User Experience).

  Website design is not just about making things pretty, it’s also about making things delightful. Your website should be able to provide personal and meaningful engagement to your customers. A lot of times, we see beautiful websites not solving any problem for any customer and it keeps teams confused as to why they are failing. The major reason behind failure, in that case, is failing functionality - the company’s inability to solve any customer problems and inability to cater to the intent of their customer.

  How to solve this:

  - Spend a lot of time on the KPI analysis of your current website. How is your current website performing? What are some good performing indicators and what are some failing indicators?

  - Build customer journey maps and design experiences that can cater to the demands of your customer.

  - Use qualitative and quantitative intent analysis to understand your customer’s behaviour landscape and continue to improve designs in an agile way to solve the actual problems of customers related to your space.

  - SmartSites by Altudo is built with a core focus on customer ntent and making your website stand out against your competitors by making “customer centricity” a differentiating factor for you.

• Lack of Research

  Research is probably the most important pillar for a great website redesign or design uplift. Research involves everything from finalizing the CMS, doing persona research, and planning the SEO strategy, to shortlisting the UX elements important for your audience. There needs to be a proper internal roadmap to execute some outcomes out of the research assignment that adds better clarity to the whole team about the goals that you want to achieve with the website. UX Team along with a team of researchers should ideally take up this activity but roles may vary depending on organizational structure.

  How to solve this:

  - Start with Persona Research.

  - Take a lot of interviews, do empathy exercises, think according to the user perspective and understand the UX elements that they want.

  - Do competitive analysis: Understand your competitors, find competitive whitespace and all the elements of excellence from your competitors to your design backlog.

  - Combining all the research and road mapping: After all the primary and secondary research, a proper technical and strategic roadmap should be built to help different teams set ownerships for different assignments in a website redesign process.

  - SmartSites by Altudo is built with a deep research and discovery phase where we make sure that your brand doesn’t do the same mistake like others and that your website is well-tuned fundamentally in terms of your technical and strategic goals.

• Non-Flexible Technical Architecture

  Website Redesign/ Uplift is generally a heavyweight exercise in terms of revenues and resources. If not done correctly with the right technical architecture, your company will follow the same issues over again within a period of few months/ years. We have personally seen even Fortune 500 companies in situations like this.

  How to solve this:

  - The best way to achieve a flexible technical architecture is by choosing the right technologies.

  - Like, choosing a future-proof CMS/DXP which regularly updates itself against any security updates from Search Engines or W3, like Sitecore or Acquia.

  - Integrating flexible tools on top of a strong CMS/DXP: for example: in case of changing expectations around Content Hubs, Sitecore Content Hub can be a great choice to keep up with the technologies - which can be easily integrated/disintegrated without costing a fortune.

  - In the same way, flexible plug-and-play tools can be used around Marketing Automation, Single View of Customers, CRMs, and CDP requirements.- Smart Sites by Altudo are built by keeping future proofing in mind so that you don’t have to spend again to achieve the same goals after a period of a few months/ years.

• No test for usability

  Usability Testing is the process of getting your website designs tested by real people and understanding their confusion pain points. Sometimes, the website can be easygoing for us but overwhelming for our customers. Usability Testing solves that by marking negative interactions, and unachieved goals

  How to solve this:

  - Use a good usability testing tool and set realistic goals for customers.

  - Observe the recorded interaction patterns of customers and understand how it is different from the goals that you have set for your customers on the website.

  - For Smart Sites by Altudo, we integrate usability testing tools during the design and prototyping phase to get real-time feedback and make changes during initial iterations. With this your website never confuses the visitor and answers the right questions at the right time.

• Too many chefs in the Kitchen

  Decision makers overload is a big problem for most companies trying to redesign. While one function of the company may be advocating Redesign, the other one may say no. Or after the redesign process is kicked in, there might be a lot of mess around the design approvals and other silos which make the process slow, lengthy and often times failed as well.

• How to solve this:

  - Finalize a team of decision-makers from all teams and keep a single working group throughout the redesign process so that everyone is aligned on the same expectations from the beginning.

  - The process of internal feedback should be fast and agile so that it doesn’t impact overall project Delivery.

  - At Altudo, we use Design Sprints and Design Thinking Methodologies to help our clients break silos and align on the same goals of a website redesign.

Voila! We are done discussing the major mistakes and if you cope with these, we are sure that your redesign project delivery is going to be faster, smoother and more efficient.

All the best for a successful redesign!