Is it time to refresh or rebuild your business website?

Lockdown, it’s changed the way we view things, the way we lead our lives and the way that business is conducted. Online sales have increased by an enormous percentage and delivery companies have taken on extra staff to get those products to the purchasers.

Businesses don’t have face-to-face meetings at the moment, you can’t pop along to someone’s office and present your services, it’s all done online. The first place that people will visit to find a company to work with is the web. They will go to your website – that’s if they can find it.

You have a business, and a website, however, you’re competing in a crowded marketplace with other companies offering the same or similar services. This is where making your site show up on search engines is important.

Where do you start – do you have to go back to square one? Generally, we would say around five years between refreshing, redesigning or rebuilding your website is about the standard. You would generally check a few things before deciding whether to embark on a redesign. Does the site look outdated, do I want to add or extend the services I offer, can the website I have cope with this expansion?

Reviewing the site can be tricky if you have work to do as well and that’s where we can help. We can produce an overview of the site, as an introduction to our services, detailing how the site is performing, how it looks on search engines, where you are in relation to your competitors, the loading speed and a review of the content – that’s enough to be dealing with at the moment.

If you then decide to go forwards with a refresh or rebuild, we would start a consultative process along these lines.

• Analyse the existing site (some of the items I’ve already mentioned).
• Determine who your customer is, who you are aiming the website at.
• Is the content of the site relevant to the customer?
• Look at the customer journey through your website.
• Check for ‘call-to-action’ points.
• Determine your success criteria – what do you want the customer/visitor to your site to do?
• Can people find you on a search engine (without typing in your name)?

Let’s look at some items to be included in a website, things that make it attractive, not only visually and in terms of content, but to push you higher up on search engines. For example, slider on the home page, but not too many slides and not showing on a mobile phone, just on desktops and laptops. The blog, yes, news means that your site is update frequently and that you have backlinks, the blog posts should link to industry organisations.

After going through this process, you would have the necessary information to make decisions. You would know, who you are wanting to attract, how they can find you, what information they can view on your existing site – and, ultimately, how they get in touch with you – the call-to-action. You’d also have a view on how attractive your website is compared with your competitors and whether it’s going to be the structure you’d like to build upon for the next few years. We would advise you along this path.

If you decide to proceed with us, we would produce a planning document outlining goals and processes needed for a refresh or rebuild. In fact, that’s going to be one of the questions. If the site’s structure is strong enough to be used for the future, could we simply apply a new design and better content? Generally, we would use a development server, copy all of your website’s content over and work on it privately, keeping your existing site live and uninterrupted. When the new site is built and has been approved by everyone involved, it would replace the old site and go live.

Get in touch and let’s start the process now. Call us on 0203 642 0888 or email hello@ukconstructionmarketing.co.uk