This year, Chop Dawg had a big refresh of its company website. It wasn’t easy, but this is actually something we have done before during our roughly decade in business. We have some experience in this area, which is why we want to share some tips with you on how to improve your website.
So the question you may have is, why redo a company website? Why rebrand or do updates over time?
Let’s take a look how you can benefit from this and some helpful tips to approaching it.
Why We Overhauled Our Website
Our website has served its purpose since going live back in late 2013. As a tool to increase revenue, the current iteration of the company website was able to do that.
I believe that websites should go through iterative redesigns at least once a year and through major redesigns every two-three years.
This time around, we were late on updating the website as we were doing a lot to grow the company behind the scenes. However, over time it became obvious that Chop Dawg had grown past its old look, feel, and website.
A great company website should tell the story of a company’s offerings. The website will tell you why it applies to you, and why you should care.
It should be able also to show, and not just tell, to get this message across. It’s also critical that the website looks current. This gives the impression of an active and thriving business.
However, redesigning a website from scratch is a process that needs many careful considerations.
For example, how do visuals impact the way that content is read?
So, let’s take a look at the 6 principals we have followed in all of our website redesigns.
1) Create Your Website With A Clear Purpose
This might seem like a very rudimentary question, but the reality is, it is the most important question that any organization should ask themselves before writing a single line of code.
It’s common sense that a website needs to be presentable and accessible, but I want to discuss the “why”. Why should your website exist in the first place and what does it need to accomplish?
“Because I need to have a website redesign” is not a good enough reason to invest thousands of dollars into a new website.
If you don’t know why you have a company website in the first place, you need to go back to the drawing board and determine its purpose.
You’re probably wondering, how?
Figure out, if your website could only accomplish three specific things, what would they be and how you would you prioritize them?
For example, here are the three specific priorities that we came up with:
A. Better communicate our services, goals, and company culture to potential clients.
B. Position our content so that it is more easily accessible and readable for our fans.
C. Redevelop our website backend so that our non-technical content writers can easily populate the website with new posts and landing pages without assistance from our development team.
Let’s break down each one of these priorities to better understand the “why” for each.
Communicate What You Do and Why
A. Better communicate our services, goals, and company culture to our potential clients.
Let’s be real; our old website, while ahead of the curve at the beginning, became quite out of date. It didn’t keep pace with how Chop Dawg evolved.
Companies should always be evolving, maturing, and becoming better at what they do. At the beginning we were a typical website design & development shop.
Today our technical capabilities have expanded, as welll as our team. We are now a global operation.
That’s why our average client engagements have increased. We are now building apps with advanced functionality, and we’ve been getting into artificial intelligence.
Our old site just didn’t communicate this change with its messaging and design.
We have changed our messaging on our site since 2013 several times, but the design of the site itself had some catching up to do in 2023.
This isn’t something just a change of content can accomplish. No, it needs an overhaul redesign of its core structure. We needed to upgrade the design of how we communicate our narrative.
We also wanted to better organize our information to improve the user experience. Most importantly, we wanted to streamline our digital footprint.
Better Position Your Content to Improve Your Website
B. Position our content so that it is more easily accessible and readable for our fans.
Content has turned out to be a consistent way that clients discover us. While we haven’t seen many instances of readers immediately becoming clients, investing in content marketing has given us fans, which over time can become partners and clients.
Back in 2013, we didn’t even have a blog yet.
Thoughout all of our website shifts at Chop Dawg, something we focus on is improving how our content is delivered.
Our goal is always to encourage discussion with our content. It’s all a part of naturally building our community.
We also emphasize mobile friendly design, given that most of our readership comes from social media on their phones.
Redevelopment
C. Redevelop our website backend so that our non-technical content writers can easily populate the website with new posts and landing pages without assistance from our development team.
We didn’t have writers in 2013. We now have a full-time marketing director and content team.
In the past, anytime someone wanted to make a landing page, I had to take one of my designers away from a client in order to work on it. It just didn’t make sense when we want to scale our content as much as we do.
With the redesign before this one, any one of my writers or marketers was able to create the layout that they want from our backend quickly.
We also needed it to support the next 4-5 years; so as we continue to mature, grow, expand, our website can help this to protect the investment we are making today.
Are you starting to see our “why” for redoing our company website?
2) Know Who Your Website is For
I will give you an example. Who is the Chop Dawg website for?
It sounds simple: our targeted customer base. However, we have many types of customers, and therefore that requires a design that can cater to many while still being personal.
Like I said when I discussed building a site that can be scalable for my content writers, one way to do this is to build a site that can cater many different customer funnels. How do we do this? With specific content that can be helpful.
Our services are expressed in a way to educate and spark the idea of why our value proposition could be worth it.
It also enables easy lead generation. Those who are interested, can reach out to us without any friction.
This is where so many of companies screw up.
Instead of being able to win over every particular niche of their targeted audiences, companies try to speak to everyone at once. Since Chop Dawg works with many different niches, I always want the design to be able to speak to each one of those niches
IIn our early days, our portfolio page was disorganized. If a potential client came and asked, “Hey, Josh have you ever developed a location-based mobile app before?” I knew that my design failed.
Later updates turned the portfolio into an easily navigable library. If you have a particular kind of app that you’re envisioning, you’ll be able to find it through custom filters and advanced search functionality.
Essentially, you want to focus only on your most relevant audiences, the ones that will engage will you and provide a long term ROI.
3) Improve Your Website With Strategic Content
This is a long-term question. The content that I’ve written for my website has changed over time thanks to the feedback that I’ve received.
For example, if I write about a topic that my readers really like, I’ll expand on that.
Also, in the early days, it was just me writing. Now, we have a copywriter on staff. Of course, building a team is critical as a company expands.
When it comes to justifying a redesign, one thing immediately comes to mind when it comes to content, though; optimization.
Old versions of our site weren’t built for optimization because it wasn’t built for A/B testing. That changed.
When you need to figure what content to write about, there is nothing like data.
The numbers don’t lie, and with a backend that will easily let us A/B test anything from headlines to the position of our call to actions (CTAs), we’ll be gathering more insights on what we should be writing about in the first place.
Figure out what your audience wants and responds to. Pay close attention.
Final Thoughts on How To Improve Your Website
With the proper planning, thought, and strategy, you can improve the visibility and traffic of your website exponentially.
Create your website with a clear purpose and know your target audience in order to create content that resonates with them. Use optimization tactics, test out strategies, access quality resources, and analyze the data related to your website.
Keep up the great work and don’t forget to track progress every step of the way to ensure you are meeting goals.
So why wait? Take these tips into consideration now and improve your website.
What do you think? Comment below.
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