20 factors to consider when re-designing a website or blog

Re-designing a website is a very complicated process. You need to properly plan and take into account many factors to break the original design so that the website is more humane, more conducive to user experience, higher website efficiency, and more friendly optimization to the search engine. Here, let's take a look at the 21 factors that need to be taken into account when re-designing the website. You must consider them :)

1. What is the goal of redesign?

What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to change? A clear understanding is very important. Yes, you should be clear about the reasons and motivations for re-designing your website, because what kind of motivation will make your decisions. If you do not know what your goal is, you will lack the direction of re-design. You may not get a satisfactory design effect when you end the work.

2. Is this a simple website upgrade or comprehensive website rectification?

Re-design a brand new website, which can be changed from any details. Obviously, the effects of time, effort, and the cost involved lead to redesign are different. But I think you should first determine which types of changes you need to meet your goals and design. If it is a comprehensive re-design, you also have to consider to what extent "Comprehensive", usually the new website design style should be similar to the design style of the old website. If your previous visitor came to your website and was unable to recognize "You" by your brand-new design, you probably wouldn't want it like this.

3. What are the most useful aspects of the current website design?

In your current website design, there are usually some excellent and effective aspects, and you may want to retain or incorporate them into the new design scheme. It would be a good idea to make a simple summary of what you want to keep. It is more helpful for you to clearly plan your design scheme.

4. What aspects of the current website design are not worth using?

If you re-design the website, you will lose some design documents. For example, what do you mean by your new visitor? This is exactly the opposite of the above. You should maximize or discard these designs that are not worth using.

5. Who are your target users?

In any design process, you can never forget the visitor and must be visitor-centric (Note: except for those who do not care about the visitor ). Target audiences, target them, and play a "fatal bullet"-what kind of design style will your users like? (Note: during the design process, you should keep this question mark in your mind and play one bullet after another, are you afraid that users will not survive your website? Haha !)

6. How can we make the website more convenient for users?

For a website, powerful functional applications are indeed a good thing. However, if you spend a lot of time building up a lot of unnecessary "advanced functions", it is not convenient for users to use. (Note: in particular, with the upsurge of web, simplicity has become a trend of the times, except that your website audience is a professional computer user. Otherwise, remove all of your fancy and impractical special effects !)

7. Do I need to change the logo or brand image?

Logo or some commonly used design that conveys the brand image of a website. Do you need to re-design the website at the same time? The answer is, if your logo is not a very good "Universal logo", it refers to the logo design that can be well integrated with the global design in any web design, then you may consider designing a uniform logo based on your new website style.

8. Is it to maintain or change the Dominant Color of the website?

I have already said it at, because most of the time, you will want to keep the general style of the website for those old visitors. Therefore, using a similar color scheme is one of the best methods. Of course, you can add some subtle tones to make the website seem so fresh, but it won't be recognized by old visitors. (Note: I think it depends on the design style. For example, one of my favorite web designers is 531. His blog changes its color every other time, there are very few design pictures on his webpage. They all show the Dominant Color of the webpage by coloring some text links, so that even if the color is completely changed, while giving visitors a fresh feeling, it will not make visitors unable to find the north. Second, if there is no major adjustment to the webpage layout, the color change will not cause a big difference between the front and back designs .)

9. What screen resolutions do visitors use?

This is also very important, although some web designers may ignore it. Services such as Google Analytics can easily provide you with such information. Obviously, a fixed-width webpage should take into account the visitor's screen resolution.
(Note: Some bloggers have asked me about the adaptive width of the webpage. It is not difficult to realize the adaptive width of the webpage, but it is completely necessary. Although I also liked adaptive width when I started designing web pages, I later found that it was terrible! Especially when an adaptive width design runs at a screen resolution above 1280 pixels, unless you have good control and the page layout is indeed suitable for adaptive width, otherwise, we do not recommend that you use adaptive.
In addition, I generally use the most common 1024*768 screen resolution as the benchmark. Because, although I have not done a survey in China, I guess half of users still use old-fashioned pure screens or even general screens. Using 1024 pixels is the most appropriate. 800*600 pixels of users I basically chose to ignore! In this way, you don't need to worry about the wide screen. I 'd rather the wide screen user looks at a small page in a wide screen, and do not want the page to be wide enough to have a horizontal scroll bar !)

10. What is the network speed of the viewer?

The average network speed of your viewers will help determine your webpage design elements.

(Note: If your browser's network speed is generally slow, and your webpage uses a lot of JavaScript, the left music player and the right video player. What do you think will happen? To put it bluntly, in this era of high-speed broadband development, the most important thing for a website is not Seo, website content, user experience, but speed! Speed and passion! Your Seo performance is good, the content quality is high, and the user experience is good. Visitors can enter your page in half a minute, do you think people on Earth only know one of your websites?

11. What should I focus on?

Every design is designed to remind everyone of what to pay attention. Knowing what you want to emphasize gives you a focus on design. You can take a look at Caroline Middlebrook. When She redesigned her blog, she used a large area in the blog to store her special content, for example, her free e-books. Obviously, for her, this is what she wants others to focus on, and it is also a good display of her own region.
(Note: In conclusion, highlight the key areas of your design as the advertising space .)

12. How can we make the navigation better?

Navigation is one of the most important factors for a website. If you have added a lot of content la s in the previous webpage design, the original navigation may not be so good. You should try to build a web page navigation that is most convenient for users, so that they can easily jump from here to there, and then jump back here :)

13. What do visitors want to see from your website?

It is essential for any website to meet the needs of its viewers. Do visitors come to your website to find information? If so, you should make the materials a prominent design so that they can easily find the materials. Will they go to the site to find products after reading the webpage? It is wise to leave a significant address on the product page. From the perspective of viewers, think about what they think and give them the best and most convenient webpage design.

14. How can I increase user interaction?

The most successful website allows visitors to participate enthusiastically. Blogs are the most powerful application in this regard because they can be consulted and discussed by viewers. Others include forums, games, survey results, and quiz. Make your viewers more fascinating to your website, and you may have more "regular customers ".

15. Who is maintaining and updating your website?

Who is maintaining and updating your website? Of course you are! Really? This is a problem. Especially for blogs, in fact, message recipients are also helping you update website content. Although you should keep the code concise, when others contribute content to you, you should be equally valued by others.

16. Do you need a Content Management System (CMS )?

Many website owners prefer a CMS, such as WordPress. Because they can be easily updated without any web design. Many theme patterns are pre-installed in the system. To save time, CMS may be a good choice.

17. How can I improve Seo?

At any time, if a website needs to be re-designed, the search engine should be considered. Is the current design unfriendly to search engines? How to place the current page title for the best effect? How can we reasonably increase internal connections? And so on.

18. Which keywords and phrases are the focus of your webpage?

Of course, keywords should be used for title, Head, a link, and ALT attributes. If you don't know what your target keywords and phrases are when designing a website, it means that your most suitable design scheme may be out of the box and won't even have much effect. This is not just about searching, but about your current website.

19. Which webpages and searches are popular on your website?

If your website has a very good page, that is, a relatively high access volume and a good search engine ranking, you should not make major changes to these pages, this will often reduce the ranking of your pages in the search engine. Similarly, what search terms are currently popular on your website, and you should not do more. The only certainty is that they should be well preserved in the new design scheme.

20. What internal links are on the page?

When you want to redesign the web page, you should take a good look at the internal links in your website. To ensure that these links are not lost in the new web design, it is best to use the same URL structure.