“Would you be able to move the image half a pixel to the
left?”
“No...Not this one --- no no no, this one's too bold ---
too thin --- too sharp --- too cheap (ours is a premium brand!) --- This one's
too...heavy? Nope --- THIS ONE! Why not try THIS ONE? It has such a great
'feel' to it, don't you think?” – Request for Font change
“The logo must be 200% bigger” – Request for Logo size
change
“This looks nice, but there is too much white space. We are
going to send you more text to add”
“A client is telling me that he was disappointed by my lack
of font creativity, and can’t I use something edgier like Arial?”
“Biscuit colour was fine on my monitor and her monitor but
on his monitor it was too pink. Therefore please take all pink out of it.”
Remember these funny requests from your clients or your web
marketing team requesting certain editing or design change in the sites.
Sometime it becomes a little annoying – but it is happening and it will remain
happening thereafter. But is there any way by which we can avoid these kinds of
issues and focus more on productive development?
Website redesign: A small Introduction
Image: Yahoo! at 1997
Do you remember the old version of Yahoo? See the snap if
you are not able to recollect. Now compare it with the current version of
Yahoo! (Well, just type it in your browser. No point to get a image here also.
) What differences do you see? Well don’t give much pressure on your brain.
They are no way comparable. They have renovated the whole site so much that it
is really tough to pick a single part or element to compare – Yahoo has changed
the entire theme of its website design with no elements from the previous
versions lurking around.
What do you think – was this renovation necessary? Actually
yes, – with the expansion of online world Online media has come up as a very
strong marketing too and it has become really necessary to redesign your websites
to cope up with the changing times and meet demands of the ever evolving consumers
who are getting more and more alert on world wide web for their online as well
as offline purchase. In today’s world the average life span of a website is 2/3
years – and you need to renovate accordingly. Why do you think Coca Cola change
their campaigns every now and then? (Remember the hug me campaign and then
again share the happiness campaign with the two small cans attach together. Did
you check their website then?) You need to change your website with time to keep
your customers and target audience engaged and make them visit your page every
now so often.
Website redesign: Who needs it?
Let’s just see how many kinds of people are there in this
world in this context:
One,
who knows about every details of website development, from html coding to CSS, PHP,
Ajax, Java script, XML and everything, obvious example, website development
agencies, or the technical team of any ecommerce or any corporate site.
Another,
who has little bit of understanding of html, or the database system or the
functionalities, example, online marketers (except the people from IT
background, but still they don’t focus both on marketing and details of web
development together)
Then we
have the people who have their website designed by some agency and they need to
call them every now and then for any sort of changes.
Well you may argue that there are some people who still do
not know what a website is or what is internet, but sadly they are not a part
of this discussion.
Time is Money (Oh wait! What’s new about it?)
Times is money – nothing new about this line. But the
question is how much is it relevant in this context. So let’s have a look of
the situations of the three kinds of people discussed earlier.
Image: Blinksale (before redesign)
Image: Blinksale (after redesign)
For the expert one: You (agency) have
a lot of clients to handle or you (company’s development team member) need to
take care of the company-wide server issues as well as issues related to the
site, and in addition to that, you get calls for all sorts of changes as are
needed by web-marketing team. So you have to handle the critic issues very
carefully or critical development (something like the Blinksale redesign from
the images) in the website with high priority. Then suddenly one of the
marketing team member starts calling you for some very simple development, such
as, change of the position of the CTA button or some colour change or some font
size change, which, according to them, is very critical and which needs to be done
ASAP. What would be your reaction? – “Oh GOD, wish if I had more time, or more
people (which company is not allowing for budget)”. As an agency you need to do
all sorts of changes from a critical one to a simple one, based on the clients’
knowledge or understanding.
Image: ThinkGeek (before redesign)
Image: ThinkGeek (after redesign)
For the semi-expert: You want to
do some changes in your site, (take the not-so-complicated example of ThinkGeek
in the above images), and you know it pretty much well that it shouldn’t take
so much time which your development team is taking. So you do a pretty much tug-of-war
with the team to have it done. Even if you want to do some changes by yourself,
you don’t have the access to the backend, perhaps, because of the strict IT policy
of the company.
Image: Gyminee.com (before redesign)
Image: Gyminee.com (after redesign)
And it is worst for the last one.
You need to do some changes in your website, let it be a font change, logo site
change or product placement in the home page or some elements to be removed
like guminee.com (see the above images) and you have to approach to the agency
every now and then. If they are already held up with “critical” issues from
other client, you have to wait for some time to have it done, and in certain
cases, it becomes a really frustrating and irritating. And for your kind information
gyminee.com, from the example, had a 20% conversion rate increase for this simple
change. Even there are cases where simply changing the colour of CTA button has
a significant improvement in conversion rate. So even a small change shouldn’t
be ignored. Isn’t it?
So the whole point, if you think minutely, is all about
time. All need to go through the coding and make changes to have the changes on
the website. Well, if it is a significant change, time is not an issue, you
can’t simply compromise with time with the site quality or structural
development. But what about the changes in font, font size, colour or say,
placement of the elements which actually take a lot of time. If you start
tracking the time for those editing time, it’ll be an eye-opener for you, though
most of you already feel it, and I’m sure of it. The time, which if you can
save, you might have utilized for solving other real world problems of managing
an online business or simply hosting a website, like a server issue, or issues
related to your web sales, or marketing.
Editify: How we save the time
You might be able to organise your web development team and
processes to save your time, but when various redesigning or editing requests are
received consecutively, then it becomes a challenge – defining the actual
“critical”, from a web development perspective, and not from the clients’ or
web marketers’ perspective, and moreover, prioritizing them accordingly.
These day-to-day situations require a novice friendly ‘Do it yourself’ tool which should be easy to
use for anybody, even if someone does not have any knowledge about web designing or html coding – an easy to use
interface to do the editing on the webpage and uploading it to the server. The
user just need to put the predetermined JavaScript codes (also available freely
and easily understandable) in the specific pages and will be able to do in the
browser itself. Once these are done, save it and make it live and --- voila,
it’s there. No more nagging for time taken by the web development team, no more
reprioritizing your issues. Even for the agency also it will be a big relief.
For the small editing procedures they will be able to make the asked changes
quickly and make it live in less than half the time. Everybody is happy and
everyone can save a great amount of time.
The concept was discussed earlier between the business heads
and software development team and after a few months Editify (Visual Website
Editing) was formed. This tag based editing tool makes life easier. By
estimate, Editify reduces the time consumed by these issues by 66%, which can be
used by the companies in more productive and immediate tasks as well as with the
factor of great client-satisfaction.
How it can be used?
You
have a dynamic website, say, News site. And you need to highlight your polling
for a day or so. You need to rearrange the elements in the page to give a space
for the polling (considering your CMS application will not have any conflict
with it).
You are
marketer of an ecommerce site where the collections change season wise. You
have two sections – ‘New Arrivals’ and ‘Best Selling’, where you want ‘New
Arrivals’ should be before ‘Best Selling’ in the beginning of a season, say for
two weeks to one month. Otherwise it would be opposite.
Your
company provides product(s) or service(s), say an ecommerce, or a portal for
eBook, or an eLearning solutions and you are pretty sure that your
call-to-action needs to be changed.
You
have introduced new product(s) or service(s) and you need to make your target
group aware of it. So you need to put some information in your homepage or a
specific landing page.
These are few examples which are very much important and can
significantly impact your business. You can share more significant incidents or
cases where you think it’ll be very useful.
Sayan Majumder
Online Marketer, an avid reader and a movie enthusiastic. I
love to travel and meet new people.
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