Rebranding your business is a major undertaking. It’s not a project you start out on lightly and it demands challenging strategic choices from the decision-makers in the company. At the end of the process, you expect to have a coordinated market presence that positions you in the right light for your clients. It’s pretty difficult to do that without incorporating a website redesign, for several reasons. The Role of Web Design in Rebranding Your Business Your company website is your shop window to the world. It’s unlikely you would change your logo, your target market and your company colors without redecorating your shop window, right? To use an extreme example, if your sales tickets are red and your website uses blue, customers will have a hard time connecting you with your products. Your website is the central pivot around which your online presence revolves, so it’s important to achieve synchronicity with your overall image.
Steps for Getting it Right Appearances do matter, for both your customers and the performance algorithm Google uses to rank websites. If you’re making the investment in rebranding your business, take that all the way by ensuring you use best practices for your website. #1: Include a digital component in your rebranding strategy. If you’re developing brand guidelines as part of your project, keep in mind that these most often emphasize traditional marketing media such as print, television, billboards and advertisements. The digital space has its own set of rules, and it’s not enough just to do a website redesign that includes your colors and logo. They need to be executed correctly to translate effectively, and a professional web design agency will know how to do this. If necessary, prepare a digital version of your style guide to ensure employees working on digital properties have the right frame of reference. #2: Identify the rebranding factors that are non-negotiable. By determining which pieces of your rebranding project are the most important, you can make the right decisions for adapting these on the website. This might include:
A website redesign is a big part of any rebranding project. There’s a common perception that it’s as easy to make changes online as it is to designs for print as long as the piece hasn’t been finalized yet. That’s not strictly true with web design. A “small” change to the shade of your official Pantone color can affect everything on the website in progress, from the theme and templates to the CSS classes. Getting final approvals before you start work can save you lots of time, money, and wasted work. #4: Check your ADA compliance One of the benefits of digital technology is that it’s so readily accessible to people with disabilities, as long as it’s set up the right way. Developing a web design that doesn’t conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards opens you up to a world of hurt. Since 2018, lawsuits against companies that aren’t compliant with these standards have reached record highs. Rules include ensuring your color contrasts meet minimum accessibility requirements, navigation is possible by keyboard only, and text can be scaled up to 200% larger than the original before horizontal scrolling is required. Implementing all these things after the fact can be challenging, so it’s best to cover your bases before you begin. #5: Adjust your content marketing strategy. Many older websites were static digital properties without the option to add fresh content on any regular basis. That’s now an outdated method, and new websites are heavily dependent on content and search engine optimization (SEO) to get found. You may need to rewrite much of your content marketing copy as part of your website redesign, but chances are good you’re rewriting it anyway to align with your rebranding strategy. Even if you’re adapting the copy you use in your other media for the website, be sure to incorporate quality keyword research into the process. Take care to follow best practices for SEO, to avoid being penalized for taking the wrong approach. The Last Word You don’t necessarily need to cough up top dollar for a website redesign, but failing to invest in it as part of a rebranding project can lead to unintended consequences at a later stage. These might include having to redo it to solve performance issues, a site that doesn’t fully reflect the quality of your business, or failing to meet the tastes and standards of your target audience. Think of your target audience, and the impression a well-designed and high-functioning website will have on them, and you’ll understand the value of investing in this aspect of your project. For more information on rebranding your business and the role of a website redesign in the process, please contact our web design agency in Raleigh at 919.460.7978.
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Having a website is useless if it’s not set up correctly for search. If Google (and other search engines) aren’t able to index it, you might as well be invisible because the only people who will find you are those who know to go directly to your web address. And once sites are indexed, for every search that users do they see results listing websites based on how well they conform to the search terms used. A good Raleigh web design agency will be able to help you ensure your website is visible and makes use of all the best practices that search engines base their ranking on. How Search Engines FunctionThink of Google and the other search engines like answering machines. Internet users search for information using common, relevant words and phrases, and the search engines use automated processes to find websites where those words and phrases appear. The sites they return in search results show up in the order they are ranked, which depends on how well they match the search terms and the quality of their setup. That can only happen when the bots used to find websites containing those search terms are able to actually see the updated content, which is how ranking works. Search engines have three main operations that enable them to find websites containing the words and phrases searched for:
How Ranking WorksWhen a user searches for something specific, the machines hunt for matching pages and deliver the results. The bots gather and index words, links, and their locations to determine their relevance to any given search. These are then ranked automatically based on more than 200 factors. The most important of these are:
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