Redesigning Your Website: Working With Leadflask

Redesigning your website can be a daunting challenge. Several issues can present themselves, including:

The time it will take
The cost involved
How many ideas you’ll be expected to contribute to the new design
How effective will the website be at capturing leads and helping your company grow?

That last one is often the biggest fear for businesses we work with.

The success of a website includes numerous factors, not all of them related to the design, but the way you structure your site can be the difference between growth and stagnation. If the website is effective at generating leads for your company, it will pay for itself many times over.

At Leadflask, that’s what we do. We use data-driven results to create websites that build authoritative brands through immersive experiences.

To do this, we work collaboratively with you to understand your company, business goals, customers, and differentiating factors, to build a website that highlights each of those strengths and speaks directly to your intended audience. Then we test and improve the site rigorously to improve and optimize it, to help you meet those goals.

Ready to see that process? Good, because we’re excited to share it with you!

Discovery and Planning: What Do You Want From a Website Redesign?

First things first, we want to learn more about your company, and also want to make sure you get to know us and our process.

So the first step is our Discovery Phase. Here, we’ll walk through:

Your company’s history and current brand positioning
The core audience for your products or services currently
Initial exploration of any audience types you’d like to begin targeting

Next is the Planning Phase. Having learned all about your company, Leadflask will put together a document that we believe accurately represents the project's scope, its goals, and we’ll include a prospective timeline.

No agreement is final at this point. It’s important to us that you understand our process and have a chance to ask questions. Only once we’ve gone through the project’s parameters with you and made any necessary adjustments will we finalize an agreement and begin work.

If a company skips these steps with you, you’re gambling with your website redesign, because you’re not forming the foundation of what it is trying to accomplish.

User Experience (UX): How Will Your Site Function?

The first step of our website redesign process is the user experience (UX). The user experience design process shapes how your website functions.

While we’ll talk in general terms about user experience in the planning phase, it’s here that we really begin to drill down into how your site will be used.

What is User Experience?

User experience (UX) refers to how users interact with and perceive your business via its website. UX design is all about creating an experience that meets the needs and expectations of the target audience.

The goal is to reduce friction and help users feel satisfied with their time spent on the site. Here are a few questions we might ask to get closer to a satisfying UX design:

What steps would come next for users based on their previous interactions?
What information are users looking for, and at what time?
How can we help your users navigate as pain-free as possible?

A Story of Two Teacups: Leadflask’s Approach to User Experience

Take two teacups. The first looks amazing! It has a button to stir your drink, a couple other buttons for…well, you’re not sure yet, but it’s probably something cool. It’s also gorgeous.

But it isn’t microwave-safe, dishwasher-safe, heat-resistant, and it turns out that one of those buttons doesn’t do much at all unless you connect to some Bluetooth network that you can’t be bothered with.

The 2nd teacup is plain, elegant, can be used in the microwave or dishwasher, and doesn’t burn your hand when you try to hold it.

Which one of those are you going to use long-term? Hopefully the choice is obvious.

Now apply this idea to web design. Functional and elegant is often superior to flashy and complicated. Clear navigation. Digestible information. Ease of use. This is what keeps users coming back to a website over and over.

Your website can still look good in either model. But in the “simple teacup” model, it’s more focused on exactly what it should be doing well, rather than distracting you from the fact that it’s a worse product.

At LeadFlask, we want the second teacup, and hope you will too. A good UX design ensures the website is usable and intuitive.

How Does Leadflask Ensure Good UX?

This is where the technical stuff comes in.

We’ll create user flow maps to streamline the site’s navigation, mapping out distinct paths through the site that lead to core topics, products and services.

Or we may use data from your current site to analyze how it’s currently being used, and adjust to improve it.

How Can You Help With UX?

Throughout all of it, you’ll be able to provide feedback and input, because we want to make sure the user experience matches with your company’s goals as well.

At this stage, we need your collaboration and feedback on our user flow map. We want to know your ideas, thoughts, and concerns about the new catered user experience.

User Interface (UI): How Will Your Website Look?

If UX is how your website functions, then the user interface (UI) is how your website looks and feels. Think of this as the visual portion of the process.

What is User Interface?

During the user interface process, we'll customize how your users interact with your site. We'll design everything from the color scheme and typography to the interactive features like buttons and menus. This process aims to make site aesthetics and interactions as appealing and accessible as possible.

To work toward a great user interface, we’ll use techniques like wireframing, which is basically an outline of your site that we can adjust more easily in these early stages. We’ll also use mood boards and other reference materials as inspiration.

Lastly, you’ll get to see various prototypes of the design before anything goes live, so that we can make adjustments as we work. Your feedback will be obtained at all major steps.

Why is the user interface process important?

The UI design process is important because it enhances the overall user experience. A well-designed UI helps users find what they want, making them more likely to engage with and return to your site.

Without this process, the user may struggle to navigate or use your website. It also sets up the foundation for the developers during the next stages of the redesign process.

How can you help with UI?

You can help with this process with your feedback. We want to ensure you're happy with the look and feel of your website before we bring it into the development phase.

Web Development: Bringing the Blueprints to Life

The UX and UI processes above create the blueprints. Web development brings them to life.

What is Web Development?

Web development is the process of turning UX and UI design concepts into fully functional websites using code. Our development team codes everything from scratch.

How does LeadFlask approach web development?

Here at LeadFlask, we create websites from the ground up. This method may take longer, but it gives us the flexibility and freedom to create any imaginable vision.

When we build your site, we focus on keeping the code as functional and clean as possible. Throughout our process, we test for bugs and errors in our code so that each phase of the project runs smoothly.

We'll also work closely with you to ensure the site looks, feels, and functions exactly how you need it to.

Why is web development important?

LeadFlask's approach to web development offers unmatched flexibility and extendability.

Overall, our process allows us to seamlessly adapt your website to evolving business goals. That way, your website will always remain relevant and aligned with your vision.

How can you help with web development?

You can help us with web development by clearly communicating your short and long-term business goals. When coding your site, we want to ensure our work lays a foundation for and supports your future ideas.

Creating a detailed plan helps us stay on track with your vision. It can save time and money by offering the ability to make quick adjustments in the future.

Quality Assurance: Problem-solving with Live Testing

Quality assurance testing is one of the most important steps to building your site. This involves a series of tests that ensure the site functions and looks as it should.

At Leadflask, we used various strategies to test and optimize your site:

Unit Tests: A technique designed to evaluate specific components or functions of a site. These are run before launch, and also before any major update to a site’s code.
Usability: This is when we have users interact with a site to provide feedback and questions. It can be hard to identify user issues when you’re working on something daily, so it provides a fresh perspective on the site and its functionality. The result is an updated layout to avoid confusion and streamline access to the site’s features.
Accessibility: This is where we ensure that the site is usable for people with disabilities or specific needs. There are several standard practices for ensuring that those who are color-blind, vision-impaired, deaf or have other disabilities can still interact with your site.
Performance & Speed: The speed at which your website loads can affect the user experience as well as search engine rankings, so we test and adjust to keep load times within acceptable parameters.
Cross-browser & Device Testing: If your site doesn’t work well on tablets, or only some phone sizes, it will hurt you significantly in developing a loyal audience. We test across all major devices and browsers to ensure a smooth experience on each of them.

Launch Your Completed Site

After thorough testing, we'll launch your newly redesigned website. At this stage, you can explore the new layout and observe how it helps your business. We'll also collect live user data from your launched site to help us in the next phase: continuous improvement.

Continuous Improvement: Making Your Website Even Better

For many companies, the website redesign process ends after implementing a new design. Here at LeadFlask, we view the website redesign process as continuous.

Continuous improvement is when we continue to work on and add to your site after the initial development concludes. As your site grows and needs change, we may dig into content marketing for your website, site appearance updates, and adjustments based on site analytics.

How Long Will the Redesign Take?

We believe that doing something right is more important than doing it quickly. That said, each phase of our process is designed to flow steadily into the next to keep your project moving forward.

So while there isn’t an exact timeline, since each project will have different scope and challenges, a typical website redesign takes between {X}.

What About Troubleshooting?

What happens if you notice a problem on your site, or something unexpectedly breaks?

We have staff members monitoring the websites we maintain and can generally respond to issues like these extremely quickly, often fixing them within hours or even minutes.

Issues do occur with websites, and there’s no way to guarantee you won’t have sporadic problems. Quick attention to any such discoveries is the best way to minimize their impact.

Your Website Redesign with Leadflask

A well-executed web redesign will improve your site's visual and functional aspects. Our user-centric approach helps create a seamless and enjoyable experience for all site visitors.

The bottom line is a better experience for your users, and greater effectiveness for your website in meeting and exceeding your company’s goals!

Redesigning your website can have a profound impact on your customer interactions. By embracing a holistic approach, we can help your business unlock its full online potential.

Ready to learn more? Contact Us today to get started! Or read more about working with Leadflask, via the articles below: