8 Essential Steps to Redesign Your Website

In our previous blog, we explored the critical elements for a successful website redesign in the context of asset management. As you move deeper into your discovery work for a website redesign, we highlight several strategies with a proven track record of success in redesigning an asset management website. It's essential to clearly understand what works most effectively to attract and convert prospects into new clients.

The Method Matters. Creating a Website That Sells

Before we dive into several specific redesign strategies, it's crucial to address the elephant in the room: budgeting. Budgeting for a website redesign can be complex, especially in asset management firms, where various departments often have different priorities and goals. Without a clear purpose, owner, or defined audience, website redesigns take longer than planned, and cost overruns often become the norm.

The average cost of building a website can vary widely, from $12,000 to $150,000, while maintaining a site may range from $400 to $60,000 per year. The key takeaway is that a website redesign's cost depends on size, complexity, and functionality requirements. One of the top cost determinants is the design method to be used.

Traditionally, the "waterfall" method has been the industry standard for website design. In this method, the project is fully scoped and agreed upon before development begins. Theoretically, this should minimize scope creep and contain costs. However, in practice, it often leads to conflicts, delays, unexpected expenses, and outdated websites that fail to deliver on their intended purpose.

Over the past decade, a new approach, called Growth-Driven Design (GDD) or Agile, has gained prominence as a superior method for website redesign. Unlike the waterfall approach, GDD requires identifying only the most essential site functions to start development, allowing for rapid site launch in as little as six weeks. GDD emphasizes incremental improvements based on user data analysis, ensuring the website evolves according to best practices.

GDD provides several key advantages:

• Faster Launch: GDD enables quicker website deployment, crucial in a dynamic industry like asset management.
• Data-Informed Decisions: By making data-driven decisions, you can optimize the website's effectiveness, focusing on what truly resonates with your audience.
• Budget Efficiency: GDD helps prevent spending resources on developing site elements that may not be essential.

The ultimate goal of a GDD website is to convert visitors into leads. A conversion can be as simple as a visitor providing their contact information in exchange for valuable content like an eBook or a checklist. Once a conversion occurs, your website can continue to nurture that lead by delivering relevant and timely content, keeping prospects engaged along their buyer's journey until they are ready to turn into clients.

A well-structured GDD site can become your most reliable salesperson, working around the clock to nurture potential clients. It's a tool that can significantly contribute to the growth of your asset management firm.

Eight Essential Steps of a Well-Rounded Redesign Strategy

The success of your website redesign project relies on a series of critical steps:

1. Benchmark Your Current Performance Metrics: Understand where your current website stands before redesigning. Conduct an audit in which you analyze metrics such as the number of visits, bounce rate, time spent on the site, top-performing keywords, inbound linking domains, leads generated, sales, pages indexed, and pages receiving traffic. Tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics can be invaluable.

2. Determine Your Website Redesign Goals: Identify your objectives for the redesign. Whether it's increasing traffic, reducing bounce rates, improving domain authority, generating more leads, boosting sales, or enhancing SEO rankings, set clear, data-driven goals tied to measurable results.

3. Define Your Branding and Messaging: Before starting the redesign, ensure your branding, messaging, and unique value proposition are crystal clear. Visitors should immediately understand what you offer, how it benefits them, and why they should stay on your site.

4. Define Your Buyer Persona(s): Craft your website design and content around your target audience. Understand their needs, questions, and pain points to tailor your website to their language and preferences.

5. Protect Your SEO-Optimized Pages: Maintain the SEO value of your existing high-performing pages. Identify these pages and plan proper 301 redirects if you need to move them to a different location on your site.

6. Analyze the Competition: Evaluate your competitors' websites to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Use tools like HubSpot's Website Grader to generate reports on your website's performance and compare it to competitors.

7. Take Inventory of High-Performing Content: Identify your most-shared or viewed content, high-traffic pages, top-performing keywords, and pages with significant inbound links. Protect the effectiveness of these assets during the redesign.

8. Choose the Right Software: Select the appropriate content management system (CMS) to create and host your website. The CMS you choose will impact your website's development, design, and publication. We are huge advocates of HupSpot’s CMS for many reasons.

These key steps will lead your website redesign project to success. Each step is crucial in ensuring that your redesigned website attracts visitors and converts them into valuable clients. Stay tuned for our next blog in this series, where we'll discuss how to select the right partner agency to make your website redesign project a success.