The Science and Psychology of Website Redesign

February 29, 2016
|In Digital Experiences
|By Katerina Pena

When companies and brands look to update their digital strategy – be it by taking on a new platform, or transforming any of their current ones – there are many technical facets to consider. After all, if your website’s technical foundation isn’t solid, your users are likely to have trouble accessing it.

Before beginning a digital refresh project, leaders should ask and answer these important technical questions:

  • What programming language or combination of languages should you use to create your website?
  • Do you need to integrate a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system into your site?
  • Do you have an authentication platform to offer users a personalized experience when they login with their username and password?  ‘
  • How about validating your technical build to ensure that you won’t get dinged when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
  • And what about social media integration?

In addition to keeping clean code, all of these technical questions are integral to the success of your overall digital strategy.

For the new build is to be successful, answers to these technical questions form half of the equation. To truly deliver results, there are additional important and less technical dos and don’ts to follow:

Don’t code yourself into a box. Your website should be something that grows with you and shouldn’t need to be recreated every six months to a year. When planning, ensure that your site infrastructure has the opportunity to scale with your business so you don’t find yourself needing another overhaul prematurely.

Do look at your competition. Pinpoint what your site is doing (and not doing) well, and then examine your competitor sites to see how you compare. Your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) placement is a great place to start hunting for how your company shows up compared to the competition when common search terms are applied.

Do explore what your target audience does on the web. There is a considerable amount of research available on a variety of audience segments and their online behaviors. In fact, through audience segmenting, you can specifically target people by age group, sex, interest, industry, geography and sites visited. As you look for leads, or to be viewed by more potential customers, you can execute digital advertising solutions to reach them in all the places they’re likely to be online.

Do learn how your audience likes to take its content. People like to get different kinds of content in different ways, at different times, on different platforms and devices. Some want video on their iPhones. Others prefer infographics on their tablets. Some like a big-screen view of lots of information during the day, when they’re likely to be at their desks, but more bite-sized content when they’re away from the office.

The digital world is probably one of the few areas that takes equal parts technical perfection and creative prowess to be 100% successful. The clean coding that’s used behind the scenes must be paired with a major element of human psychology. Why would someone come to your website? What information are they looking to find? What visual design will give a visitor the best representation of your company and brand? And then write your content and organize it in a way that will engage them further, while appeasing the SEO gods.

In truth, relationship between technology and creativity must be symbiotic when it comes to a successful digital strategy and execution. Content may be king, but if the kingdom is built on a crumbling foundation, neither will be long-lasting.