For business owners, a website is often the first impression you make on a potential customer. It's your digital storefront, your business card, and your best salesperson, all rolled into one. Navigating a website redesign can be a daunting task, and not knowing the ins and outs can result in a subpar online presence or leave you stuck managing a website that doesn’t meet your needs.

It’s important to not just hire the design company that delivers the flashiest website. You’ll need a web partner that’s proficient in web development, web design, search engine optimization (SEO), web accessibility, and more to get the best website possible. Without all these considerations, you could be left spending money on not just redesigning a website, but also a considerable amount fixing it.

Managing Website Content

Content creation is one of the most important aspects of a website. Not just crafting a message that resonates with your target audience, but making sure that content can be managed through the website effectively. That’s where a content management system (CMS) comes into play.

A content management system or CMS is the foundation a website is built upon that gives users control over the content of the website. If something on the website needs to be added, edited, or deleted, the user can log into the CMS and make the update without having to edit any code.

Things to know:

Can I easily log into the content management system?
Can I efficiently change the content I need to?
Can I manage users for my content management system?

Design For Accessibility

Beyond aesthetics, design serves an important role of presenting content to your user. Thus, it’s crucial to make sure the design does not exclude anyone from engaging with it. This includes users on different device platforms, and users that rely on assistive technology to browse the internet. Failing to address accessibility concerns not only cuts out a portion of your target audience; it could also lead to accessibility lawsuits depending on your industry.

Things to know:

Is my website design responsive to all device types?
Does my website require accessibility compliance?
Do users have accessibility options available to adjust the design to their needs?

Optimize For Humans & Search Engines

A good user experience is also great search engine optimization. Your website redesign team should understand this and take important steps to ensure your new website does not jeopardize conversion rates or organic rankings.

Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Missing or unoptimized meta data is a poor representation of your website if people are looking at organic search results. While it’s true that Google and other search engines will crawl the website for suitable content outside of the meta data related to a search query, it’s still important to make sure titles and descriptions accurately represent what can be expected when someone clicks on a link.

Things to know:

Do all pages have a page title and meta description?
Can I update each page’s page title and meta description?

Redirects

Any time a URL changes on the website, a redirect needs to be created to ensure the user experience is not disrupted. You don’t want people going to an old URL and running into an error page. Same is true for search engines crawling the website. If they find missing or broken links, it’ll have a negative effect on your website’s organic ranking viability.

Users and search engines should be taken automatically to the latest version of the page. This is especially important with website redesign projects because they involve updating potentially every URL on the website.

Things to know:

What happens when someone goes to a URL from my old site?
Will existing redirects be addressed to avoid multi-step redirects?

Canonical Tags

A canonical tag tells a search engine what version of a URL should be indexed while ignoring all the other possible variants. While no one deliberately creates copies of pages just to have duplicate content, there are ways a website can generate duplicate pages through minor variations in the URL. For example:

Does your website have both HTTP and HTTPS versions?
Does your website have both www and non-www versions?
What happens when the URL contains a query string?

An example of a URL that has multiple versions might look like this:

Canonical URL: https://www.discovertec.com/services
Variant not to be indexed: http://www.discovertec.com/services
Variant not to be indexed: https://discovertec.com/services
Variant not to be indexed: https://www.discovertec.com/services?utm_campaign=campaign

Any one of the above situations can lead to another version of a page you did not intend to create. Thus, a canonical tag can tell search engines which versions should be indexed, and the rest be ignored.

Things to know:

Do all web pages have a canonical tag?
Can that canonical tag only contain the master version of the URL?

Website Redesign Consultation

If you’re not confident the company you hired is delivering everything needed for you and your businesses website to be successful, don’t worry. DiscoverTec is more than capable of providing a way forward.

For a website that can perform both visually and functionally, contact DiscoverTec for a free consultation. We’ll make sure your website looks great and meets your specific needs to make it successful the first time. We specialize in web design, development, marketing, IT services, accessibility, and more.