So, you want to redesign your website? These are the 6 key website development phases your tech business can't afford to skip

Close your eyes and think of a big tech brand, like Apple or Google. 

When you picture Apple, you no doubt see their iconic apple motif and the clean white lines that characterise their online and offline presence, emphasising their focus on elegant, minimalist, and intuitive solutions.

Meanwhile Google channels the rainbow, harnessing block shapes and primary colours to generate energy and excitement across their product suite, giving each an individual look while remaining unmistakably Google.

They are two very different brands, yet both instantly recognisable.

And both amazing examples of a successful brand design process.

Where website creation fits into your branding project 

Step 1: Business alignment - understanding your organisational goals, your current messaging and what you need from the brand/website redesign process.

Step 2: Brand strategy - harnessing data and research to identify your market position and your ideal audience to craft an effective customer-centric narrative.

Step 3: Brand design - discovering your visual identity and creating brand elements to capture the essence of your business and communicate your value to customers.

Step 4: Website creation - developing a modern responsive website which educates and demonstrates your solution to drive traffic and conversions.

Step 5: Go-to-market support - providing ongoing targeted support to maintain your website, leverage your updated assets and create additional resources.

Why it’s not wise to jump straight to website design

First, we need to identify what type of website you're building. This will be determined primarily on how you generate revenue and where the website falls within your sales process. For example, if you Create an online app. Or, or course. Your website is transactional. So, you might actually want people to sign up to your app on the website, so everything should be geared up towards that.

You may have a blogging website where you primarily generating revenue through affiliate links. So you want people to read and click out from that and make purchases somewhere else. It could be that you're selling products directly, it could be physical products or digital products. Where the end goal is actually getting people to make a transaction on your site.

Or if you've got a more complex sales process, Which is what we're going to focus on yours is effectively a brochure site and it becomes part of your sales funnel. And here it might be educational, but your end goal. The entranceaction is typically someone booking a sales call with you, it might be intermediately such as downloading lead magnet, but you're ultimate sale on the website.

Is getting a call with the sales team and then the sales team can take it from there and which points your website more becomes a reference point for people to come back to So once we've identified what type of website, we are going to be developing, we then want to review your existing site for a easy question to ask is Does it help you generate sales in your business?

That might be it, you might have the right type of website already. However, if this was a website that was produced a long time ago, it may be that. Your product has changed. It may be the way that you sell it. You might understand your products in the needs of your users more and you're no longer communicating.

What it is that you're ultimately doing, and what how you're ultimately helping your clients, it could just be that over time, you've built up more and more pages and It's just causing a lot of confusion with people when they're landing on your website. Am i even be that you assumed everyone was going to go onto your home page, but in fact, a lot of people land on a different page and they navigate somewhere completely different, which means that they're not getting half of the information, you are hopin

How does the brand design process work?

Unlike the previous stages which are very collaborative, the brand design process is where you hand control over to your agency or designer. This sees your designer harness their expertise to bring together all of those different ideas of your business and put them into something that is visually unique to help you stand out in the marketplace.

To ensure the best possible result, there are 6 key website development phases that you can’t afford to skip:

• Reviewing your current site and analytics

• Mapping user journeys

• Planning out site structure

• Designing page layout and storytelling

• Choosing your website technology

• Adding content, imagery and more.

Investing in each of these elements creates a unified and unique brand that delivers a consistent experience to customers, both online and offline. Consistency is key to developing an effective brand, reinforcing your brand identity and building that all important trust factor with your target market.

Reviewing your current site and analytics

Am i even be that you assumed everyone was going to go onto your home page, but in fact, a lot of people land on a different page and they navigate somewhere completely different, which means that they're not getting half of the information, you are hoping So a simple way to start with is that you should have something like google analytics.

While on your website, i'm google search console as well. Have that up and running and here you can see what pages people are landing on, which are your exit pages.

Mapping out user journeys

You can look at journeys within your website how people are navigating through your website. Um you know what search terms All there that people are.

What in terms? People searching to find your website and what pages that landing them on. Um, where what pages are people viewing immediately before they either download and article or Going actually book a sales call. Um so it could be here, you know, within your website you might have different types page.

You might, you might have a blog on your website and that generates most your traffic or it might be one of your your sales pages speaks directly to people and that creates more of your traffic. So you just need to understand how people are using your website, where they're coming from, so because it might be a social media.

It's uh, end of a bigger entry point or ads for you. I've so first off looking at actually how People entering a site where they're leaving and then you can map out the journey, they take throughout your website depending on what tracking you've got. You might actually be able to tell how many times people visited your website before, ultimately downloading or booking at a sales call with you depending on what software you've got.

Planning the site structure

So planning the site structure. But it always recommend go with the minimum or the smallest site. You can imagine working. So, One. It reduces the the time and cost to go live with your new site because you might have gone through this process of understanding your target audience, refine your messaging get new branding, but then you try and recreate a few hundred page websites and that can take, you know, if that takes a year You're missing out potentially on a lot of new clients.

So if you can get something the smallest site possible that sells your product live as fast as possible. That's the, the best option. To start generating leads and start testing out your new brand making refinements to any language. You've got So when you're planning site structure, keep it simple to start with what is it you essentially need? Do you need to migrate your blogs across? Are there. It might be that you've determined that there are lots of pages. Which are generating small bits of traffic. So you want to migrate them across into the new website, but not have them listed in the menu.

So it might be their entry points through google. Or another search console but there and they drive traffic into your website. But if someone lands in your homepage, you don't easily navigate to those pages. You might have Updated language that you want to use. So a quick ways to migrate a lot of those pages in and only focus on key sales pages and key educational pages that you need to get your new message out there and your new branding and language up there live and test it.

Designing page layouts and storytelling

So, once you figure out basic site structure and you can easily just draw this out. You don't want to have a look at your page, layout design and storytelling. So here i'm talking about your main sales pages, you main product pages, You know, what is it? You're going. How within these pages are you going to educate people?

So you need to obviously understand who your educating or who you're actually going to be viewing these pages which you should run previously. And what is the story that the page wants to tell? And here you obviously want to make sure people understand, you're talking to them, you want to talk about the problems, they're facing and clearly show that you have a solution.

And don't expect people to click this first time. But after that, you may people keep revisiting your page where all your website and it's where blog articles will help and any case studies that you've got can help with a friendship. Effectively, you want to with a page. Create a layout design, that tells a story.

Just get your headlines throughout the page. I a rough layout so you can get a rough design and then you fill it in with more detail. And as you feel it more detail, you can then get images that actually work along this, you can find it and then you actually go into to building it.

Choosing the website technology

There are lots of different content management systems (CMS) out there to use as the base for your new website, but we’ll focus on the main three:

• Drag and drop

• Monolithic

• Headless 

Drag and Drop

Sites like SquareSpace and Wix take care of the back end coding for you, streamlining the time and effort required to build a new site. You simply log in, drag and drop to create your design, load up your content and pay a monthly subscription for continued access. 

This is a simple and straightforward solution for small teams who don’t want the stress of maintaining a complex website. However, this simplicity does come at the cost of customisation as you don’t have access to the back-end code.

Also, if you have a larger team, drag and drop solutions don’t offer the same level of backup or review stages as their monolithic or headless counterparts. This could cause issues and confusion when making updates to the site. 

Monolithic

Sites like WordPress fall under the monolithic banner. Free to start with, add-ons will add to your running costs (such as hosting and premium themes). Using open source software, you have ultimate control, allowing you to install modules (plug-ins) to customise your site and ultimately set it up how you like. 

Every time someone accesses a page, a monolithic CMS runs software on the database to load that page. Obviously you need good caching options to manage this load and maintain site speed. To get the most from this system (which can feel outdated), an IT team is required - something not every small business has on-site.

Headless

Sites like Storyblok separate the back end and the front end of your site to improve speed, maximise security and reduce storage constraints. This gives you the ultimate flexibility to integrate with any platform and publish everywhere.

So, your headless content management system where all of the editing, so all of the logins, the security, the how the data is stored, how we build the page, and the back end, that is all taken care of, by story block.

You pay a subscription fee for Storyblok to them to do that. All of that data is then output as json, at which point you can do anything you'd like with that to create a front end. So you could then create some some software, hosted on something like github, and use a platform like Netlify to pull in that code, pull in that json, generate the website code for you and generate a static website, which is then hosted by netlify. This has the advantage of being incredibly fast and super-secure - as no one has access to your back-end, the risk of a successful cyberattack is quite low. 

Adding content, imagery and more

Speaking of consistency, the last piece of the brand design puzzle are your business templates. Branding doesn’t only elevate your business - it can also help streamline processes and increase conversions with well-designed proposals, documents, presentations and reports.

Including consistent branding and clear messaging in your suite of business templates puts your business in a strong position from the get-go. You look more professional, your USP is front and centre and your prospects will be more likely to want to know more.

Can a single agency offer all these services?

What should you expect to be included when you actually go to an agency? Ideally, you should have someone who takes you through the entire process who Map outs, you know, user journeys throughout your website can help, determine what pages you need. Will be able to design those pages, create all of the copy for you all of the, the design or any graphics required for the page, be able to mock up the design at least for first few pages.

So you can see how it all looks. And then ideally be able to build the website as well. You can separate out a lot of these tasks this generally not recommended, they're being There's a lot of school being able to talk between a design and the end product. I Going with a team where they've already figured out the communication between designers and developers is one of the best options you can take.

To make sure that the final product Looks how it was promised. You're also then, any if anything goes wrong, there's one team, there's one agency. You can go back to that has full responsibility rather than Dealing between a developer who says the designer didn't do it correctly in the designer going, while the developer should be able to create this for me.

Are you ready to design a killer brand for your tech business?

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