Our Website Before

I recently came out with a new website back in 2018, almost three years ago. I was happy that it had a shopping cart and had free downloads available for anyone to use. That was the main feature of the website, with custom graphic and web design services being a secondary focus. It was a nice upgrade from our original website, which didn’t have much content at all. I liked that it has tons of free downloadable images and it highlighted those items similar to an online portfolio. It was a little rushed at the time. I got tired of working on it and eventually pushed it live, even though it wasn’t perfect.

The Problem

I thought that overall, it looked fine. However, there was something off about it that I didn’t like. One day, I tried to add a landing page for my web services and got stuck. I couldn’t design it. So, I was stuck with either re-doing my entire website or just giving it a facelift.

The main purpose of the website didn’t exist. I didn’t like how it didn’t explain much about my services and they were hidden under different a “Custom Services” product category. I felt like visitors would come to my website and be confused about what exactly I did. I thought it could be more sales-y overall. So, I decided a simple website re-design would be best. I would start by giving the homepage a new look. Once the homepage was done, I can revisit the inside pages and rebuild them as I go. So, about 2 weeks ago, I started tinkering with a new homepage.

Goals & Solutions

Theme & Site Builder Changes

One of my main issues with my old website was that it was using old technology. The theme I had used previously wouldn’t upgrade correctly. When I did a test run to bring the theme version up to it’s most recent one, it broke almost everything and looked awful. I also don’t use WP Bakery’s Visual Composer any more, which is what I used to build my old website. I switched to using Elementor builder, because it’s free and updates are easier. So, it’s what I use on all of my websites now. I have also used Astra theme on most of my website builds, so I decided to use that as a new theme. The benefits being that it comes with pre-packaged websites and it’s also easy to create, customize and update.

Updated Homepage

My old homepage featured a banner image, a few product highlights and custom service highlights. It didn’t show much of my work and didn’t describe anything I did, aside from listing maybe 3 or 4 services. I liked the design and colors, however the functionality was lacking. I pretty much started over with the same basic wireframe, but added a “Capabilities” area and “Our Work” area to view examples of what I do. The main focus was no longer selling or promoting free downloads. Instead, it shifted to being about exactly what I do and showing it off more.

Increase Call To Actions

There pretty much weren’t any CTAs (call to actions) on my old website. If you don’t know what those are, they can be buttons, text or links that get your potential customers to act towards buying something. CTAs can help bring in business and help websites get more customer leads. About a month or two ago, I decided to add a large CTA button at the top that says “Get A Free Quote”, but that was only a temporary fix to a permanent problem. When I re-designed my new website, I added a contact form at the bottom of the homepage, which serves as a main point of contact. I also added CTAs and buttons to my contact form at the bottom of almost every page. So when visitors are on my website and they reach the end of the content, they are directed towards a goal I want them to complete. This should bring in more contact form submissions in the future.

Increase Copy for Better SEO

I ran my old website through an SEO checker for fun and noticed there wasn’t really much copy on any of the pages. Copy is very important to not only describe to your visitors what you do, but also for search engines. They read the text on each page and that is used to match the keywords in searches. The better the quality of the copy and the better you will rank for certain searches. So, I kept that in mind and wrote a few paragraphs for each page. This way, I have better keyword ranking and my website is much more visitor friendly. You can easily read each page and learn much more about my business. Writing more copy for myself was a breeze. I grouped each section on the appropriate page, so that there is plenty of copy and it’s all organized. Once I touched on each topic I wanted to, I had my services page ready to go.

More Landing Pages

One of my goals lately was to add more landing pages. That is what made me re-do my website to begin with because I couldn’t easily add one. So, I kept that in mind. My new website is more tailored to look like a landing page, especially on each service page. This makes it much easier for me to add pages when I think of them, instead of having to create one from scratch every single time.

Conclusion

Overall, I love my new website. It feels much more like a traditional service-based website, instead of an e-commerce store. Keeping the same colors and logo, but re-designing the website was a good choice. It feels more fresh and the focus is on what I do and how I can help other businesses. Only making a few small changes made it much more goal-oriented, so that should go a long way with bringing in more business. Every website should have a main goal, and if it’s design doesn’t reflect that, it means it’s time for a makeover. Contact me to learn how your current website can be improved and I’d love to help you out with doing so.