Near the end of 2016, we decided to reevaluate how our website was working for us. We’re a web development company, so you’d think that would mean we’d be great at updating our site; but sometimes, it’s hard to practice what you preach, and even though we help clients improve their websites every day, it was hard for us to the same to ours.
No matter how much you love your website, it’s a good idea to revisit the design and function every so often to be sure it’s performing how you want it to. A site audit is always a good idea; it can help you identify missed opportunities, areas that need improvement, and links that may have been broken since you launched.
To perform our site audit, we interviewed our staff (and a few clients) to see what was working and what wasn’t on our site. We also ran our site through speed tests, link testers and more. We used Google Analytics to give us solid numbers on which pages had good traffic and which needed work, and we added a marketing analysis to see if our efforts were having a positive effect on site traffic.
Initially, we’d only planned to refresh our website — to rearrange some pages, change a little bit of content, and maybe add some new photos. Often, that’s all a company will need to do to give their site a tune up. But after seeing the results of our site audit, we decided more changes were an order and decided to do an entire site redesign instead.
Here’s what we learned through our site audit:
Our Emphasis Was in the Wrong Place
One of Infomedia’s major selling points — the thing that sets us apart — is our support department. Strong customer service is part of our package, and our clients love that they can call us any time for one-on-one trainings or for help with questions. But the thing that makes us different was under-represented on our website! It was difficult to find information about support, and it was hard for current clients to find out where to submit a support ticket. On our new site, website support has its own page, and it’s easy to submit a support ticket or ask for help.
Our Services Menu Was Confusing and Incomplete
We provide a wide catalog of services, all the way from website design and development to digital marketing. Our services were all listed on our website, but not in a way that was intuitive for our clients to browse — it was difficult to know what you needed unless you already had an idea of what that was. We reorganized our services menu around questions instead of just listing options. Now, a client can choose between options like “Find out What’s Working” and “Get Your Website Noticed” instead of being expected to know what terms like “heat map” or “ad retargeting” mean without any context.
Our Photos Weren’t Working for Us
Our blog required large-format photos that spanned the entire screen; they were also strong horizontals. That meant that we needed extremely high-quality images, and it also meant that we couldn’t usually use the same image both on the blog and as a social media promo, since those formats tend to be square-shaped. Our new blog doesn’t require such high resolution, and the horizontal shape isn’t as extreme, so we have more flexibility when choosing photography.
We also realized that in many cases on our website, we weren’t adding alt-text to images. This means we were missing out on an easy opportunity to add some SEO power. Moving forward, we’ll be making sure our images incorporate alt-text.
Our Site’s Look Didn’t Reflect Our Company Culture
We’ll admit it — our previous website was the victim of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation. The original vision of our designer had been changed so many times that the site looked more sterile than sleek. “There’s no humanity on this site” was how one of our interviewees put it — ouch. One of Infomedia’s big selling points is how approachable we are, and our website didn’t reflect that. Our new site uses lots of casual imagery of Infomedia’s web designers, web developers and support staff at work; it’s a lot more reflective of what we’re really like as a company, and we love to offer our clients that kind of transparency.
Our Website Wasn’t Driving Leads the Way We’d Like
We love that so many of our new clients come to us through recommendations from our current clients — you can’t beat great word of mouth, and we feel very lucky to have it. But even though most of our Analytics were sound (we’re happy with our bounce rate, new visitor rate and number of page views), we wanted more conversions, too.
We discovered that the culprit might have been our contact forms — some were too long, some were too confusing, and we were missing a lot of opportunities for calls to action. On the new site, contact forms are simple and clear, and we paid a lot of attention to thoughtfully placing the throughout the site.
What We’re Learning
Our site has just launched, so we won’t know for several weeks whether or not the new design is working for our clients the way we hope it will. But we’ve already had positive feedback from clients, our leads and conversions are rising, and our staff feels better represented by the content on our redesigned site. We hope you love what we’ve done!
Even if you’re not a current Infomedia client, if you’re looking for a site audit, we have good news — we’re happy to sit down and walk you through a website audit for no charge. We’ll run your site through a few key tests, have our staff take a look, and check out what’s working for you and what might be working against you. If you decide not to take action after that, we’re still happy to meet with you. And if you do want to make a change, of course we’ll be here to support that, too. The new year seems like a great time to evaluate and maybe even make some changes; learn more about site audits and get yours started today!
