Last Updated on June 30, 2021 by
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s also the busiest, especially for business owners. The holiday season is fast approaching, and that means your calendar is likely filling up quickly as well.
Even though you’ve already got a lot to do, are you also thinking about making some improvements to your business, such as doing a website redesign during the holiday season but is it even possible with all the stress and business?
The short answer is yes. You need to be strategic, though. Read on to learn more about the benefits of redesigning your website as part of a digital marketing strategy, as well as what you can do to make the process as efficient and stress-free as possible.
Why Redesign Your Website?
There are lots of reasons why you might want to redesign your website. Here are some of the top advantages that a refresh has to offer:
- Improve and modernize your website’s appearance
- Make sure your website reflects your brand
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate
- Increase your website’s mobile responsiveness
- Increase website traffic, especially from mobile users
- Better optimize your website for a search engine
- Improve your website’s security and protect it from hacks and data breaches
Do any of these benefits appeal to you? If so, there’s a good chance you could benefit from investing in a redesign.
Signs It’s Time for Redesign
In some cases, it’s easy to see that a redesign would be beneficial. You might have read the list above and known that redesigning is a good idea.
Sometimes, it’s not so clear-cut, though. Does your website need to be redesigned, or are you better off focusing on other things?
If you’re on the fence about a redesign, here are some warning signs you ought to be on the lookout for:
- Your website looks old and outdated compared to your competitors’ sites
- Your website doesn’t have a responsive web design
- Your traffic is down
- Your click-through rate is down, and your bounce rate is up
If you notice any of these warning signs, it’s time to take action.
How to Make Time for a Website Redesign During the Holiday Season
Do any of the warning signs mentioned above resonate with you? Are you interested in experiencing the benefits of redesigning your website?
Remember, you can make improvements to your site without taking valuable time away from other projects. The following are some of the most effective avenues you can take to squeeze in a great redesign:
Identify Your Goals and Priorities
If you’re looking to do a website redesign but also don’t have time for a complete overhaul, a good starting point is to identify your top goals and priorities.
Why do you want to redesign your website? What kinds of results are you hoping to see? What are the most important things you want to update on the website? What types of changes do you think will have the most significant impact on your business?
Take the time to sit down and answer these questions before you move forward with your redesign. Doing so will help you go in with a plan and avoid merely throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
Talk to Your Team
Remember, you don’t have to make all the decisions on your own. You have a team for a reason. Sit down with some of your colleagues and ask them what their opinions of the redesign are.
What problems have they noticed? What kinds of changes do they think will be most beneficial to the website and the business as a whole?
Give everyone in the meeting a chance to provide input and share their thoughts. Allowing everyone to contribute helps ensure that you’re making redesign decisions that will help move the business in the right direction.
Use Data to Identify Priorities
When it comes to identifying your top redesign priorities, it can also be helpful to evaluate the data you’ve collected through your business’s website.
Reviewing the data gives you a chance to see how people are currently using your website. For example, which pages are visitors spending the most time on? Which pages have the highest bounce rate?
If you see any glaring issues by looking at the data, you can then make those issues your top priority and try to fix them by redesigning those parts of the site.
Make Changes Gradually
No rule says you have to redesign your whole website all at once. You don’t have to shut everything down and go through a massive redesigning sprint. In fact, it might be in you and your business’s best interests to move more slowly.
By breaking down your website redesign into smaller chunks, you can alleviate a lot of stress while also ensuring that the project still gets done. Once you’ve taken the time to identify your goals and priorities for the redesign, break the process up into pieces.
For example, let’s say you want to update the home page, improve your blog’s layout, and make it easier for people to see your services list. Don’t demand (of yourself or anyone else) that all of these changes get done in one week.
Set a deadline for each change. You might even want to break those changes up into even smaller changes.
By the end of the first week, you might want to have a draft of what the new home page will look like finished. Then, by the end of the second week, you might want to have the home page’s changes completed. By the end of the third week, you can move on and set a deadline for when the redesign of the blog’s layout needs to be completed.
This approach seems a lot less stressful than trying to tackle everything in one fell swoop, doesn’t it? When you handle the redesign in this way, you’ll still be able to get everything done during the busy holiday season. You will not have to worry about juggling all the elements of a full redesign on top of all of your other responsibilities.
Be Realistic
It’s important to be realistic with your expectations when you’re trying to squeeze in a redesign, too. This is often easier said than done, especially when you have specific goals, you’re trying to accomplish with your redesign.
Expect the Unexpected
Remember that things rarely, if ever, go smoothly and exactly as you had planned.
With almost any redesign project, there’s a good chance that you’ll run into problems. Your webpages might look different on the computer than they did in your drafts, for example, or their mobile-friendliness might not be up to par.
With this information in mind, you can see why you need to be realistic and acknowledge that you’ll likely run into some roadblocks throughout the redesign process.
Set Realistic Deadlines
Being realistic also means that, when you’re setting deadlines for yourself or those who are handling the redesign, you don’t expect more of them than is feasible.
For example, don’t give them less than 24 hours to complete a task after you’ve sprung it on them, especially if they’re already juggling a lot of other projects in preparation for the holidays. Talk to them about what they can and cannot do, too. Let them know when you’d like to have something done, then ask whether or not that seems feasible or if they need a little more time.
Set a Realistic Budget
You should also be realistic when it comes to your budget. Before you dive into a redesign, think about what you can afford to spend on this project.
The holidays are stressful enough. You don’t need to make things harder for yourself by stretching your funds too thin or taking on a lot of debt to complete a project.
Give yourself a budget right from the beginning and stick to it. This is essential, even if your budget doesn’t allow you to do all of the redesigning you want to do.
Pick your top priorities and focus on those for now. You can also invest in additional redesigns later when you have the funds to do so.
Be Flexible
On a similar note and being realistic, it’s also important to allow yourself to be flexible.
If someone tells you that it will take a little longer than you had hoped to complete a specific task, accept that and keep moving forward. If the color you originally planned on using doesn’t look as good as you’d hoped, try a different color instead.
Stricter Isn’t Always Better
You might pride yourself on sticking to your convictions no matter what. Remember, though, that stricter and more rigid isn’t always better, especially when it comes to redesigning your website.
If you’re too rigid with your plans and expectations for the redesign, you’ll end up creating more stress for yourself and everyone else on your team. Failure to be flexible can also result in you getting changes that aren’t great for your website and don’t move your business closer to its goals.
For example, let’s say you had your heart set on using a specific new font for your homepage. When you preview the new homepage from a mobile device, though, you find that the font is hard to read.
If you remain fixated on using that font, you could end up making your homepage look worse, which could turn people off from continuing to peruse your site and make purchases. This is likely the opposite of what you want to happen, right, especially during the holidays?
Test As You Go
You don’t have to wait until the redesign is finished to test out the changes you’ve made to your website. It’s a better idea to test things out as you go.
Save Time
When you test the changes to your website along the way, you can save yourself time. Think about it. If you do regular tests and notice a small issue with the layout during one of them, you can quickly fix the problem and continue moving on with the redesign.
If you wait until everything is finished, though, it’ll likely take a lot more time to fix the problem. Don’t forget. There might also be downstream problems that occurred because of that one issue. You’ll have to select all of those in addition to the original problem.
Save Money
Testing as you go can save you money, too. It’s far less expensive to address problems as they arise, rather than waiting until the end.
Which would you rather do: Spend a little extra money to fix a problem when you first learn about it, or spend a lot of money when a project is finished (or supposed to be completed) to address the problem and all of the downstream issues caused by it?
Assign a Redesign Point Person
You might be the business owner, but that doesn’t mean you have to oversee every little change that takes place on the website. If you have too much going on and don’t feel that you can handle people coming to you regularly to approve website updates and redesigns, put someone else in charge of the project.
Reach out to another member of your team and ask them to be the point person for the website redesign. Then, let everyone else know that they’re supposed to go to that person if they have questions or need to get something approved. The point person can then check in with you at regular intervals to get your approval or make sure things are going according to plan.
Let Them Do Their Job
Delegating and assigning a point person is a great way to take some of the weight off of your shoulders while still making sure everything gets done.
For this to work, though, you need to give the point person space to do their job. This means you’re not micromanaging them or checking their work.
Trust that they know what they’re doing, and they will make the best decisions for the business and help you accomplish the goals you set for the website redesign.
Work with a Third-Party Service
Perhaps you don’t have anyone on your team who is comfortable with site design or site redesign. Maybe everyone is too strapped with other holiday-related tasks and doesn’t have the time or bandwidth for additional work right now. If this is the case, it might be in your best interest to work with a third-party website design service.
Benefits of Hiring a Third-Party Service
When you work with a third-party website design service, you get to enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing you have professionals on the job. You’ll be working with people who specialize in website design and redesign, and you’ll be able to feel confident that they know what they’re doing and know how to help you accomplish your goals.
Professionals are also, in most cases, more efficient since they’re not juggling other responsibilities in addition to your website redesign. They’ll be able to give it their full attention and will get things done faster.
How to Choose the Right Design Service
It’s not enough just to Google “website design near me” and hope for the best. If you’re going to be working with a third-party design service, it’s important to do your homework and ensure you’re working with a reputable company.
Here are some factors to consider when hiring a design team:
- Experience: How long have they been in the website design business? What kind of training do their designers have?
- Portfolio: What kind of projects have they taken on in the past? Can you see samples of previous designs and redesigns?
- Price: What do they charge for their services? Do these prices work with your budget?
- Timeline: How long do they anticipate it taking to complete your project? Can they meet your desired deadlines?
- Communication: Are the designers easy to talk to? Do they seem like people you’ll get along with?
- References: What do their past clients have to say about their work? Would they be willing to hire this design service again?
- Revisions: How do they handle revision requests? Are they open to making changes if you don’t like something about the finished product?
Keep the answers to these questions in mind as you evaluate your options and reach out to different design teams. They’ll help you narrow down your search and find the right person (or group of people) for the job.
You might also want to consider what other services they have, such as content marketing or social media marketing. As the holiday shopping season begins, your business could benefit from shoppers seeing holiday promotions on Facebook or Twitter.
Redesign Your Website Today
As you can see, there are lots of ways that you can make time for a website redesign during the holiday season. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll be able to overcome a lot of the challenges associated with updating your website during the festive season.
If you want to bring in a professional to do the heavy lifting for you and need help finding web design near me, we’re here for you. Reach out today to learn more about our services or to set up a consultation.
Drew is an avid photographer whose images have won many awards.In fact, all of the images on this site were taken by him.
When he is not helping Nimbletoad's clients stand out online you'll find him surfing, hiking in the mountains, or fishing off the coast for yellowtail.
He lives in Vista, located at the northern tip of San Diego, with his wife Brooke and their three dogs Nora, Oliver, and Fin.
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