A client facing website should be modernised and play an active role in building the brand’s reputation and opportunity pipeline.
By redesigning the front end, you should aim to create a user journey which incorporates other part of the marketing mix, and can be tracked and logged in the CRM.
Why redesign?
A frontend redesign doesn’t impact the systems and API on the backend of a website. This makes the exercise relatively safe, although requires time to think about the branding, and key messaging.
Modernising the look and feel positions you better among your competitors going into 2020 and beyond, furthering the confidence and trust that clients have with the brand.
It can also make some key quality of life improvements for clients, as they can easily find the latest reporting 24/7.
Benefits
- A streamlined user journey
- Mobile friendly
- Creates a level of confidence with prospects
- Improvements for client reporting
- Better data collection on new pages
- More room to provide news and research
- A chance to review the branding guidelines
Considerations
- What system is the current website on?
- Who will write new content?
- Do we have brand guidelines?
- Applying updates to all global sites.
Deliverables
A mobile and tablet friendly website, optimised for prospects and clients who are constantly on the move.
The site becomes more tactical, with specific thought going into “conversion” pages, and thought leadership.
Mobile and tablet friendly
The website will be optimised for devices that require fast loading times, bigger buttons and an even more streamlined journey.
Clear user journey and goals
Having the data to see which pages get the most traffic is key. With this data we can clearly define what the user’s journey should like on the website.
We can integrate our CRM into the key landing pages, to capture more information and interests, and start to hone in our key messaging.
A more confident image
A website is the front of shop for any modern business. This industry trust and confine are key – first time users of your website should feel confident in the level of service provided by the company.
Key messaging & branding
Before we get to the mockups and wireframes, we will need to decide on the tone, positioning and key messages it wants to convey.
Just like the imagery used on the website, the navigation, order in the menu and page priority should all be agreed up front.
Most companies will take this opportunity to do a brand refresh or will re-skin the website just after refreshing the brand.
- Agree the key messages of the brand
- How do we want to be perceived?
- How often do we want to add new content to pages?
Targets
3
Key messages, per product
50%
of the site map made
40
total website wireframes done
Mockups and wireframes
40% of all the wireframes and mockups will have been made now, which means we can start to implement them onto a development server for testing.
The main testing will be around the mobile and tablet performance, as this is the most unpredictable.
During this three month period we will be creating content for the new pages.
- Mobile, tablet and desktop wireframes agreed by sub-commitee
- New imagery is purchased and supplied
- New content is being created
Targets
100%
Wireframing complete
30
of all total new content created
20
Testing is completed
Moving to staging environment
Now that all screen sizes have been mocked up, and new content is being added – we need to think about stress testing.
This phase of the project should be testing the caches, search meta data, user journey and more.
It’s this point where the business will need to start working with compliance teams to finalise content and prepare them for production.
- Website cache times should be decided
- The test between staging and production should be seamless
- Mobile and tablet displays should be correct
- Search functionality should be working
- Widgets build and properly displaying
Target
100
percent of data is stored
20
of the organisation trained
100
Contact record data shown
Move into production environment
With testing complete and the API’s correctly pulling data – it’s time to move into the production environment.
Teams should be trained on how to find the data and how to run reports. I would look to create policy, and have guidelines on how the data is managed and edited.
At this point I would also look to introduce a third API, like Stoneshot into the development environment
- Phase one should be complete.
- Data should be syncing to core systems and a production environment should be pulling live data.
- Test using the data in 3rd party solutions like Stoneshot
- Create a policy and technical guide for regional teams
Target
100
percent of data is stored
20
of the organisation trained
100
Contact record data shown