Six Steps to Upgrading Your Website: Part Six
We’ve reached the end of our blog series Six Steps to Upgrading Your Website – thanks for reading! We’ve navigated through the common questions and pain points associated with any website build or upgrade, and hopefully helped you visualise how your project will work.
So far we’ve covered planning, who and what is practically involved, cost, time and mitigating risk but before you break out the bubbly to toast your new site, there’s one last but absolutely crucial topic to consider – monitoring and measuring the success of your website.
Step One of our guide asked you to consider what your high-level outcomes were and what success would look like. Do you want more leads through your site? How many visitors will you need? How many sales do you want to achieve? Have you benchmarked your performance against your competitors? This is the stage where you put in place the framework to measure and monitor your progress towards these outcomes.
Design Optimisation
Having spent precious time, money and resource on your site, you should consider how making small changes to the design and layout post-launch will help you understand if the site is working in the way you want it to.
Having the ability to change a page layout and move the text, images and forms into different positions will allow you to continually measure and change your site to get it working at its optimal level.
Small changes may include changing the text, colours and the layout of content on pages - simple, subtle changes that will have a big impact on traffic and conversions over time.
This is particularly important when you consider the three principle ways your website can be accessed; by computer, smartphone or tablet, each with its own optimal layout to help you grab the interest of your online customers.
Try conducting an A/B test or multivariate testing to get the most from these changes and identify what works and what doesn’t. Confused? This great HubSpot article does a great job of explaining the differences between these types of testing.
There are tools available that can help automate this process such as Google Website Optimizer, Adobe Target (part of Adobe Marketing Cloud) and HubSpot.
Digital Dashboards
Although we’ve focused on building or upgrading a new website in this series, it's no secret that a website is the backbone of your wider digital strategy and should integrate with other important digital tools.
Remember your website is part of your ecosystem; it's the destination for your web presence, social and everything else, and everything must be connected.
Regularity of monitoring and measurement is crucial to demonstrate to your board how your site is performing. Every business is unique, for example, you may take online payments for goods and services, or use your website to generate leads for follow up by a sales team, and need a system that will push leads from marketing to sales.
You may have an advertising model in place to generate revenue from your web visitors, or any combination of these.
Regardless of your goals, there is a real business need to have up-to-date reporting and monitoring data to empower management decisions. As part of the ongoing monitoring of your website, and all of your associated digital activities, consider investing in a digital dashboard to bring all of your digital activity together in an executive report.
We’ve found the most effective dashboards are simple, highly visual and engaging. Finding a dashboard that can demonstrate the effectiveness of your site will also support your case for executive buy-in. Bear in mind, that there is so much data available you must choose the right dashboard, and the right set of stats – we can’t stress enough the value of keeping it simple.
Depending on what technology you are using, there are very powerful reporting dashboards available, either included in a larger services such as Hubspot or Sprout Social, which connect to your website and other digital services.
Ready for Your New Site?
Every website and every business need is different, but there are a number of key common elements to any website launch or upgrade.
We really hope this six part series has given you some clarity and practical advice on what you can expect from your project, from planning stages through to post-launch monitoring.
We'll be producing an e-Book shortly to accompany the series, so check back soon to get your copy. In the meantime, download our 'Six Marketing Metrics Your Board Needs to Know' to get more information on monitoring and metrics.
If you’re ready to upgrade your website today, get in touch with us for some practical advice; we'd be delighted to hear from you.
Have you enjoyed this series? Let us know in the comments below!
