If your website is having cosmetic problems, all you need is a refresh. These are things like dated photos, colours, or copy that is missing the mark. And a process like this can be very fast, especially if your website was built well in the first place. A quick meeting with a designer can make your website feel like new.
A redesign is needed when your website has problems at it’s core. These are structural and technical issues like page speed, mobile responsiveness, and user-interface. Since these problems are a combination of design and development, you can’t just expect a web designer to get the job done.
What’s the difference between hiring a web designer and a web developer? Don’t both of them know how to “do websites”?
This is like the difference between doctors and surgeons: one is diagnostic, and the other is reparative.
Web designers are great with a pencil and paper, they likely understand the way people think and move through a website, and they may even have some experience working with front-end tools like WordPress to implement their designs. You can count on a website designer to tell you why your website isn’t converting.
Web developers are the ones who can write code (without AI), who understand what is actually happening when the Internet goes down, and are the ones web designers go to when they can’t get their ideas off of paper and onto a screen.
Another important distinction to make is the difference between front-end and back end.
Front-end web is what your customer sees. It is fonts, colours, photos, layout, and copy. Our strategists look at the front-end of websites when auditing a brand. Your team makes updates on the front-end. And most tools like Wix, Square, WordPress, and so on, are front-end editors.
Back-end web is what your customer feels. It is the structure, logic, connection, and transaction. Our back-end developers make sure payments go through properly, forms have proper logic, APIs are integrated (and stay integrated), and that it all runs fast and reliably.
So, now you can see that there are front-end designers (like Jess), front-end developers (like me!), back-end developers, and full-stack developers. Our team is made up of all four kinds – do you know who on your team falls into each category?
A refresh is the right call when the bones of the site are solid. New photography, updated copy, a visual style panel update, maybe reorganizing a page or two for better flow. That’s a lighter, faster, cheaper project than what you might have been otherwise expecting.
A full redesign is the right call when the issues are underneath the surface. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, you’re losing a meaningful chunk of visitors before they see anything at all. And if your bounce rate is consistently high, that’s usually the site telling you people are arriving and not finding what they expected.
A redesign can also solve issues for your team as well. Does your “web guy” complain the site takes too long to update? Maybe you need a new CMS altogether. Is your accounting team giving you a hard time about the increasing price of Wix subscriptions? There are many examples for much, much less.
One final thing to note: your SEO is going to be impacted whenever you make a major change on your website. In order to make sure it’s a positive impact, keep a close eye on redirection, keeping your page slugs/parents organized, and as always, triple-check pagespeed along the way.
The best website refreshes and redesigns are as much about protecting what you’ve already done as it is about creating something new.
If you’d like to learn more, reach out for a free audit and consultation and let’s chat about if a website refresh or redesign is right for your business.
