Planning a website redesign for your resort? Maybe consider this instead.
Gregg Blanchard /
I’m going to say something that may be too late for some of you but is probably something that needs to be said aloud more often.
Here it is.
There is a very, very good chance you don’t need to redesign your website this year.
That’s it.
There are exceptions to the rule including concerns over accessibility or sites that were built when your new social media intern was in kindergarten. But by and large, the site that you have now is going to be just as good as the one you’d spend way too much time and money to build this spring.
Instead of a Redesign
What should you do instead? I though I’d never pretend you’d ask.
If I were you – and, to be clear, I’m not – I’d sit down with the same agency you worked with on your site, put on your thinking caps, and make a list of ten ideas to make your current site better.
A few buckets you could consider might be:
- Moving people from common landing pages to valuable next steps or from scattered pages to one key page.
- Improving the performance of existing elements.
- Trying totally new things you’ve never considered before that don’t require a redesign.
For example.
1. Moving People
Take a look at your top 3-5 landing pages ranked by traffic from organic search.
For each of these pages, decide what an ideal next step would be for someone coming to this page (i.e., “Snow Report >> Check Ticket Prices”) and then rework the content on that page within the limits of the CMS and structure to drive more people to that next step.
Likewise, if you want more people on your blog reading all that content you’ve been working on, build something into every page that moves them there.
2. Improve Element Performance
Next take a look at the sign up rate of your newsletter form. Get a good benchmark for that and brainstorm ways to triple it. No, quintuple it.
Same thing for your snow report page, your lodging overview page, your search, etc.
Then, whether that’s a popover or better wording around the form itself or just implementing better analytics so you have the tools to ask better questions and get better answers next year, just do something and see what happens.
3. Try Something New
I guess this is the point where I should be clear that these three areas are not mutually exclusive. So if your goal is moving random visitors to your blog or blog visitors to your vacation deals page, trying something totally new is often a great way to do that.
Never tried a Hello Bar? Give it a whirl. Always had your newsletter in the footer but have been curious about a pop up? Do it. Curious whether a tweak to your navigation would improve pageviews / visitors? You can probably test that without a redesign. Or maybe look at ways to simply polish the existing design with changes to your CSS files, so you don’t have to touch the HTML at all.
Just try things. Different things. New things. Things you like. Things you don’t like.
One Year from Now
However you break up it up, make a list of ten things that you can build or try or improve and then roll up your sleeves and make those changes. And, as I mentioned, do this with your agency. They know your site better than most and probably already see lots of ideas you could have implemented initially but didn’t have time for.
What you’ll find is that in 1/10th the time of a redesign you’ll improve your site to a level that a full rebuild could never achieve. Because you won’t do it based on being annoyed at the font size of your blog posts, you’ll do it based off data. And, taking a redesign off the table, your agency will remind you that you can fix a lot of stuff without starting from scratch.
Again, sometimes a redesign is the answer. But in my experience, more often than not, you’ll get more bang for your buck (and time) by simply improving on what you already have.