Member Article

Chris Buckley – MD of Pixel Kicks – discusses how to make the best use of your downtime to redefine your brand and website

The extra time that people may be getting due to the COVID-19 pandemic is a great opportunity to work on your brand, your website, and indeed all of those things you’ve wanted to do for a while but just never have time to.

As the owner of a digital agency, we usually refresh our own website every three years - and we’re overrunning that schedule currently - but we’ve now set ourselves a target to get this completed by the end of June.

We’re looking to refine our brand, focus on our core services, and make sure that our new site showcases our clients, our work and our team first.

It can be a fairly daunting task to get started with, but breaking it down into the following steps can make everything easier. Here’s the process that we’re following:

1. Assessing & refining your brand
2. Establishing goals
3. Creating a new sitemap
4. Designing a fresh user journey
5. Developing the working website
6. Testing
7. Launch

Assessing & refining your brand

Before you even start thinking about your website you need to know your brand and what it stands for. Your brand and your messaging tell your audience, competition and industry who you are, what you do and also what you value. They provide organisation and guidelines for you to follow in order to create a seamless image which your customers can easily identify with. All of that can’t be underestimated.

Successful brands have a good understanding of their target audience because if you can speak to your persona you can speak to anyone, which is what being a truly flourishing brand is all about.

With internet culture and your customers constantly evolving, it’s never been more important to stay relevant. As a result, you’ll find the need to constantly ask yourself questions to give you insight about your brand’s performance; for example: What creates success? What causes failure? How do you keep your brand and content relevant?

Establishing your website’s goals

Once you’re happy with your brand you can then move onto your website by nailing down whty you are looking to create a new website. Is it change for change sake? Or is there another aim like increasing online enquiries? Take time to work that out.

Common goals include increasing search rankings, increasing leads and enquiries, and improving the user experience for customers on. Quite often you’ll have a mix of a few different reasons, so it will be useful to write about what works on your old site, as well as what doesn’t work, things you want to lose, and things you would like to retain.

Creating a new sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all the pages or content on your website; preparing one will help you understand what’s required on your website. Start by looking at your current site. Does it tell people enough about what you do? Does it tell the story about your company? Do you have enough variety in your pages without spreading yourself too thin?

Designers might start off with creating wireframes and mock-ups to plan a sitemap, but it’s essential to come up with the structure of the site initially. To kick things off, use your goals from the previous section to decide if you need separate pages for each of your services, products and company information. Then ask yourself if you find that you are repeating the same information on certain pages; at which stage it might be better to combine them. And if you’ve already included some information on one particular page, it might be better to link to that from somewhere else that needs the same content.

Designing a fresh user journey

A user journey is a series of steps or the path a user takes on a website, and a successful journey simply guides the user to complete a certain process or task. Crucial elements of a positive user experience include, not surprisingly, its useability as well as its perceived value of the products or information on your site, and intuitive navigation from start to finish.

Websites that are frustrating to use can leave a lasting negative impact on users, so simple is usually best. Ask yourself if the first thing that viewers see on your site fits the “opening impression” of your company? Also, what goal do you want users to accomplish at the end of their journey?

Aesthetics come into play too, though with upfront work done in your brand refinement stage, less work is required here. If we had to pick one element of UX to focus on during user journey design, it would be website navigation. Making sure that users can always find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible is priceless.

Developing the working website

Finding a trustworthy agency or freelancer to work with can be difficult, but if you’ve done the groundwork above, presenting a detailed website brief to them will make the whole project run smoother. Discussion points should include your choice of CMS (content management system), any bespoke requirements and importantly timescales for completion.

It’s important that any new website is 100% mobile-friendly, secure and loads fast. Don’t skimp on these three essential elements at the expense of fancy visuals and eye-catching loading effects.

Our process for building websites is to create static HTML pages first, getting the homepage and core templates up to 90% standard. Then, usually in Wordpress we’ll take these pages and integrate the full CMS to allow the addition of content easily. To make editing common content much simpler we always create a specific “Theme Settings” section where information such as phone numbers, email addresses and key company information can be changed.

Once the main templates have been built, you can start to populate the site with your information mainly in the form of copywriting, imagery and videos.

Testing, testing, testing

A website should never be launched until it’s been extensively tested. Here’s the process that we typically follow:

1. Responsive testing on different devices such as mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop

2. Responsive testing on different operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, Android & iOS

3. Functionality issues

4. Visual, content & spelling issues

5. Loading speed

6. SEO

Through individual device testing and also automated methods, it’s important to identify and fix any bugs, and also make any responsive layout tweaks so take the time to read through your landing pages again and again. You need to make sure they flow well, aren’t too technical, are simple to understand and that the tone of voice is correct throughout.

Once testing has finished and you’re happy with the site, it’s time to get it launched. The site should be uploaded to the agreed hosting platform, and final post-launch tests carried out.

Conclusion

We’re facing unprecedented times and uncertainty. Business are quite rightly worried but the worst thing to do is to sit on your hands and wait. It’s essential that we all use the lockdown and pause to reflect where we want our businesses to be once things get back to normal. Of course focus on supporting your people and navigating them and the company through the next couple of months, but also don’t squander this opportunity to take a step back and analyse how your business can be the very best version of itself to ensure it has the strongest future possible.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Pixel Kicks .