Planning on redesigning your site but have a tight budget? You may want to rethink how you are going to spend your funds. Sure you can look into outsourced companies, chop shops, pre-designed templates or student designers, but in most cases (not to be cliche) you are going to get what you pay for. As long as your site is not a usability nightmare and looks like it was designed in 1990, there are a lot of other ways to draw attention and traffic to your site that are more important than a few bells and whistles.  Here are a few things you may want to allocate more time/money towards that in a business sense will be more advantageous to your site. If you are interested in getting help with any of them, please let us know!

Add Relevant Content
This is the first recommendation simply because it is the first option you should consider. Adding relevant, well-written content is vital in acquiring new visitors and keeping the current ones. Simply adding a few pages works, but you should definitely consider adding a blog if you are able to update it consistently. Just throwing a blog on your site and writing two posts is going to do more harm than good. However if you love to write and have a lot of great information on your industry then this is a great opportunity to showcase your knowledge. Also this will greatly increase traffic to your site through new subscribers and more indexed content in search engines.

Hire a Copywriter
A site with bad copy is a great way to turn visitors away. Unfortunately copywriters seem to be extremely under-appreciated these days. Just think of your favorite brands and I’m sure a slogan sticks out in your head for most of them. Do “Reach Out and Touch Someone” (AT&T), “We Love to See You Smile” (McDonalds), and “Don’t Leave Home Without It” (American Express) sound familiar? I guarantee they didn’t write them on a whim; most likely these slogans were created after months of creative meetings and thousands of rejected ideas. Every word on your site is an opportunity to entice visitors into reading more so don’t hesitate on spending the money to get every word right. We work with a lot of great copywriters so contact us if you are interested in a recommendation.

Start a Maintenance Contract
If you have a reliable and trusted Web designer company or freelancer then congratulations. They are hard to find, but once you do they are easy to keep. Rather than redesigning your entire site you may want to create a retainer contract with your designer in order to update the problem areas and/or pages. Making the site a bit easier to read, less crowded and easier to navigate can make a world of difference in gaining your customer’s trust. You may want to have your design team go through your site and make some recommendations on improving your site, and then give them the go-ahead on making those changes (or the ones you feel are most important).

Additional Advertising
I will assume you already have some online or print advertising for your site already. If not then stop reading and go buy some. Increasing your advertising funds seems like common sense, however many people underestimate the affects. Depending on your budget and your business you may want to run some new print ads, but most likely online advertising is going to be the easiest and “budget-friendly” way to go. Google Adwords and other advertising sites/tools allow you to set a monthly budget so putting a few extra bucks towards your budget will definitely get you some more traffic. You could also dedicate some time towards a new campaign or promotional event for your site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This one is important, but can also be just as expensive as a redesign depending on how your site was built originally. If you have an older site, or a new site that was not built following W3C standards then you may be out of luck and should stick to the above items. However if you hired a good developer then you may be able make a few small tweaks to your site and significantly improve your site’s search engine ranking.  Most professionals know the ins-and-outs of SEO because it is usually a top priority on everybody’s list. I am not going to list the technicalities of how your listings are improved, but you should definitely put this on your to-do list. Oh and most importantly, don’t let any SEO companies try to take you for a ride. I have seen thousands of dollars put into SEO just to improve rankings by a place or two, only to lose it the next month when the search engine changed their algorithms. And even worse, some companies will neglect usability and design while making the changes (SEO is completely independent of how your site appears to a visitor so don’t be fooled). I would recommend having a Web designer you trust or have a long term relationship with take care of these updates rather than hiring a new/dedicated agency.

In conclusion, I hope are helpful and turned you in the right direction. Sometimes a redesign is the most important item on your agenda, but stepping back and thinking about how it is actually going to help you acquire new business is just as important. Just because your site looks pretty doesn’t mean it is doing a good job in promoting your business. But at least it looks pretty.

Tags: budget, promotion, redesign, seo

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Business, Design, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.