Creative standards change frequently in the world of website design.  There’s always a new way to engage and interact with online content and we want the user experience on any website we build to be genuine, native, and user-friendly.  This means keeping up with web design trends and best practices, as well as maintaining a constant watchful eye on conversion rates and traffic patterns.

If you’ve noticed a lag in user engagement on your website, or just aren’t converting traffic into valuable leads like you’d prefer, redesigning the website may be the next step. We’re always going for a more refined, yet informative design each time we revamp a website. The goal is to have a clean, simple interface yet with enough information at hand to be helpful and worthy of search engine traffic.

When going for a revamp with our web design team, here are the 6 phases of a website redesign;


Research

The first step is we need to thoroughly understand your business, your business goals, your customers, their expectations and behavior, and how your website factors into all of it. We’ll also look at the competitive landscape to establish context and benchmarks for how your site should function and then improve on that. This stage will give us the foundation for moving forward with just the right recommendations for the design and development of your new responsive website.

Content

Once we’re armed with this information, we’ll set to work sketching out a sitemap, building wireframes, and writing the basic web copy to be featured on each page of the site. Wireframes look like simple skeletons of your website without the visual polish of the finished design, allowing us to experiment and iterate on solutions quickly so that we have a good sense of how content should be laid out across different screen sizes.

Design

Next we’ll design high-fidelity comps of the homepage, sub pages, and blog that show what the final designs will look like on desktop, tablet, and smart-phone screen sizes, providing up to two rounds of revisions on the design.  The are the full-color front-end designs that show what your site will look like on the web.  This is the time to decide if it capture your mood and style, and if there are any major elements out of place like font, color, or photography.

phases of a website redesign

Development

Once you’ve approved the design, we’ll start building the website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  Your site can be built natively in a Content Management System, or CMS, like WordPress or as a stand-alone custom infrastructure with a WordPress blog integration, depending on your needs. Every site we code is 100{13a4b24a1cf21b295551fb05ec2b4f838c09f4be2b40521ab3a1251850733e7a} responsive and mobile-friendly.

Testing & Integration

After coding the functional site, we put it through rigorous bug testing and integrate it with any third party software you use. To do this we’ll need to mirror your live site in a development environment, then our QA department will test the site across different browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 9+) and devices (iPhone 7, Galaxy II). Any bugs that arise from this testing will be fixed prior to launch

Launch & Training

When we get the green light from our coders that the site passes all quality inspection, we’ll transfer it to the live hosting environment and redirect your domain, effectively making the site live on the web. At this time, we’ll walk you through your live site and show your team how to log into the back end, make updates, and maintain the site long term.

When you work with a professional web design team, the process is extended a bit, but this serves to make sure we get it right at each important phase of the process, because what makes a good website is often the attention to detail along the way.  Your website is your first impression on potential customers and the primary tool most businesses rely on to generate positive branding and lead generation.

If you have questions about web design for business or the process of redesigning your web presence, get in touch with the webheads at Signal Interactive. We offer a free consultation upfront and fresh ideas for your brand.

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