Thinking about upgrading your current website? Design and optimization trends and techniques are constantly changing. C2 Strategic Communications recently took on their transformation, bringing an older website up to date.
C2 Strategic Digital Strategist Nicole Ares gives her tips on tackling a website redo.
The new C2Strategic.com’s home page starts with an eye-catching video and has a clean design.
Out with the old and in with the new is good for something things in life (like that old boyfriend you just can’t get rid of) but for a website it’s not a best practice. There are always parts of an old site that can be beneficial for the new. Strip down your old site and organize it into sub-folders: text, graphics, contact information, photos, etc. and see which elements are worth keeping.
After this process is done, work on building out a site map based on which elements you kept, which elements you want to add and what you want your user’s experience (UX) to be.
C2 kept the best (and most clicked) elements of their old navigation but simplified it for a cleaner look.
Modernize the Layout
Single page website layouts (where all of your website’s content can we found on the home page) are a design of the past. They may be mobile-friendly, but don’t enhance your sites SEO (search engine optimization) and often lack the detail multi-page sites offer.
For SEO, multi-page sites boost the ability to rank for a variety of keywords across the site. For example, if you are aiming to sell a lawn care service in Boise, Idaho. A “Services” page can target audiences interested in lawn care and a “Contact” page can target audiences in Boise. Having multiple references across the site to these frequently used keywords will allow for the search engine to link these references together and target them toward the right audience.
Great SEO is the backbone of any good site. C2 analyzed past website data to see what potential clients were searching to find them and which keywords and terms they wanted to grow when writing page titles and metadata on the new site.
Visuals are Everything
Sharp visuals will take a clean website from a B to an A+. Utilize animated icons, sharp images and compelling videos to illustrate your company’s story. Visual content will keep your user engaged as you funnel them through the selling process (of a product or your story).
Users will decide in a matter of seconds whether or not they will read content or take action on a site, and the average session duration on a website is under two minutes. So, what visually-compelling content can you offer a user in two minutes time to inform them about your company, the products/services you offer and how they can contact you or make a purchase?
To show the broad range of communications services offered, from media relations to branding and digital strategy, C2 created a visually-pleasing block of animated graphics for the home page.
