The reason you are redesigning your website is to impact your business, not because you are bored with the design. Ask yourself some of the following questions – does your existing website communicate well with the users? Do you want to increase leads – improve your funnel? Is your current website designed SEO friendly (maybe it’s currently based on table layouts? Whatever your reason you need to focus on a goal and understand that doing a redesign alone won’t generate more traffic – you don’t want your site to be a billboard in the desert.

Three tips to help you with your website redesign:

1. Establish a goal
   Whether for usability or technical improvements you need to have a clear goal and expectations. Start with some kind of website audit or analysis to see what your current situation is and key areas that need improvement.

   My previous website for instance made it difficult for users to more readily browse through more content. While there are many channels into your blog, your homepage is still most often linked to and visited. More prominently highlighting new articles and other categories will help me reduce my bounce rate and increase time spent on site.

2. Focus on content
   Content is still king in SEO. Make sure you have a plan. Plan for new content as well as your old content. You do not want to lose any of your most valuable assets. Similar to my new design you want to make sure to highlight the strength of your content.
3. Measure the results
   Have benchmarks. It’s important to know where you started. Things like bounce rate, time spent on site can be a good indication of whether or not you made the right choice. Furthermore – leads. You want to be sure that you are now able to capture more leads. Leads can be defined as anything from more people signing up to your blog, downloading white papers, sharing your content etc.
   
   Bonus tip – What if you don’t see the results you expected?
   Re-examine your goals. Were you honest and realistic about them? A common pitfall is that after a redesign you will take a bit of a plunge in the search results, this is almost guaranteed (especially for larger sites). So give it a little bit of time. Don’t expect to see immediate results. From there continue to test new content and different offers. Hopefully your new design gives you enough flexibility to try out new things.

No I am not getting married…but I was feeling that itch for a change. Ughhh it’s a designers bain, constantly seeking something new. I don’t seem to have that problem with any client sites, however my site never seems perfect enough. I guess that makes me a good designer?… always seeking perfection, which can be a pitfall…

Getting the urge to redesign is probably the #1 reason that people change their site and the #1 problem with redesigning…this may sound hypocritical, but “don’t redesign your blog just because you are bored with it.” It’s actually a natural occurrence and so you need to stick with it, because as your boredom increases users actually don’t experience that same feeling. They are happy with what you have, as long as the content is good.

With that said, I did change my heading a bit. Here’s the hypocritical part: my change was not a “redesign” per se. Besides just needing something new, I changed the heading for the following reasons (reasons that make it ok to change things up a bit):

1. I felt visitors needed more guidance, at first glance, as to what my blog was about. A snappy headline in addition to “Food For Thought” would do the trick, hence “thinking. blogging. engaging … Web 2.0″
2. I shifted images to keep the overall feel the same. Originally the “[rc]” box was on the left and now I shifted it to the right (obviously), but the overall look is consistent.
3. I tied in the image of the thought cloud to the icon imagery that I use in conjunction with my post headers throughout the blog.

Lessons to be learned: There are good and bad reasons for making changes on your site. Make sure you evaluate why you are making those changes. Test before you implement those changes. Make sure those changes are consistent with your overall look and feel. Have fun with it!