Website Redesign Tips

As an Associate Product Manager at Epson, I’ve led the redesign process for one of our product landing pages to increase our form completion rate, improve our product messaging, and overall user journey. Because website improvement processes look different across different orgs, I went ahead and created a list of tips that will help anyone regardless of the work environment one finds themselves in.

1. Explore the website and/or specific pages you’ll be improving

When kicking off any web improvement/redesign project you’ll want to spend some time exploring the website and/or landing page(s) that you’ll be improving. In this process, I recommend pretending you are the customer or prospect and explore the site through that lens. While you’re at it, don’t be afraid to interact with the content. Forms are an essential part of any website along with user sign up flows. Videos serve to inform and tell a story. As you explore the website and sub pages, keep in mind that someone made these specific design decisions, so instead of being critical approach this process with a curious mindset.

2. Note your first impressions

In addition to exploring the website, you want to jot down things that stood out to you or questions that arose as you were navigating through the site. As mentioned, design decisions are intentional and though you might be critical of some decision decisions, it’s good to follow up and understand why those design decisions were made. This will not only help you understand the goals, but also learn about possible system limitations that lead to those implementations. As you go through your web improvement projects, you’ll have this information and be able to plan with those limitations in mind.

3. Review Web Behavior Analytics

Now that you’ve gone through the exploratory phase, it’s time to dive into the discovery phase. You’ll want to reference any web behavior metrics available such as the Bounce Rate, Click Rate, Exposure rate, etc. I personally love heatmap tools such ContentSquare, which visually showcases what site visitors are doing. It helps me understand what visitors gravitate towards, where they are spending more time, how far down they’re scrolling, etc. Not only does all this information help you understand what site visitors are looking for, but it also helps inform your web improvement decisions. For example, during my time managing an Epson product landing page, I noticed visitors interacted with our product videos and hovered their mouse over various descriptions about our products which to me showed they wanted to learn more about each of those products. However, the exposure rate significantly decreased by the time they reached the midpoint of the landing page. Our site visitors were bouncing. This behavior helped me steer us away from wordy paragraphs and improve how we presented the clear differences between our products in a digestible format for visitors.

4. Identify the goals

So the next thing you want to do is clearly identify the goals and/or problems you’re trying to address. This is the time to reconnect with your manager and other key stakeholders to understand from their perspective and the changes they’d like to see and why. In my case, I was instructed to lead the redesign of the website, but it was up to me to identify the problems and goals. I spent a good portion of my time meeting with key stakeholders and getting their feedback.

This is something you’re better off doing after you’ve explored the website and reviewed web behavior analytics. The reason for this is because you don’t want the goals or problems you’re trying to solve to influence your thought process as you go through the exploratory phase. A lot of us naturally jump into problem-solving and ideating, but in order to make data-driven decisions, we need to withhold from doing that.

5. Identify Success Metrics

Now whether you work in a large organization or you’re freelancing, it’s important to identify the Success Metrics to measure the impact of the changes you implement. Depending on who you’re working with, some folks might be data-driven or not at all. As the person responsible for improving a website, you must do your due diligence and identify those metrics and communicate your reasoning for tracking those. Now when it comes to choosing your success metrics, it truly depends on the problem you’re trying to solve or the goal you’re trying to achieve.

6. Learn how leads are generated and funneled

Part of managing a website comes with diving into how leads are generated and funneled. Especially when you are looking to implement a new form or functionality to capture leads. It doesn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the tools and marketing campaigns used to capture those leads. I like to create flow maps to clearly understand what that lead journey looks when they complete a form and leverage that map to communicate this journey to other key stakeholders.

Something to be wary of when diving into how leads are funneled is that it can easily turn into a separate improvement initiative. In my case, most teams are used to working in silos and decisions aren’t always communicated directly to PM’s and/or sales and so when we have questions about how leads are tracked it tends to unpack a can of worms.

7. Create your dashboards and/or reporting

Once you’ve launched your new website you want to have reporting of the form submissions and other metrics you’re capturing and communicate this info with your team as you see fit. The reason for this is because it’s easy to assume everyone is on the same page and seeing the same results, but that is not always the case. In my situation, the sales team were not receiving g notifications when they received new leads. So I had to go back and connect with the Lead Gen team to uncover why that was the case.