If you’ve been to our website before in the past, you might have realized we’ve gotten a digital facelift! The internet moves so quickly and with trends constantly changing, it is dang near impossible to stay current on everything. Nor do you necessarily need to.
Many of the field service businesses we work with either a) don’t have a website or b) do not have a good website. If your business falls into either of these two categories, that is ok. There is hope for you yet!
But as we were going through the process of redesigning our website, here are some of the things we learned that might be able to help you out if you’re in the same position.
Content before design
When redesigning or building a brand new website, you need to know the purpose of each page before you publish it. There are websites that look amazing, but their content isn’t a fit for their design. Stress the details on your content. We had a dated website, however, the content on the site helped it perform fairly well.
Start by outlining how you would like your website to be structured. Typically, you’ll have a homepage and then links or tabs to other pages on the site, such as an about page, contact us, blog, etc. Start by writing what each page will contain. Typically, you’ll want 300-900 words per page, but that range depends on how much content you really need. Once you have the text for your webpages, only then should you move onto the design portion.
Organize or be doomed!
There are A LOT of different files, text documents, images, videos, fonts and everything else that goes into a website that you’ll have to keep track of. Start organizing them immediately, otherwise it can get messy. If you’re redesigning your site, you’re going to have to keep track of what pieces are going to correspond to different pages you’ll be creating. Additionally, you have plenty of old web pages that will need to be taken care of in terms of redirects.
Come up with a plan B...And C, D, E…..
We relaunched our website on a Saturday. We moved our website from one platform (ColdFusion) to another. With our blog included, we had hundreds of pages that needed to be moved over. It isn’t guaranteed that things will go smoothly right off the bat. Actually, quite the opposite; it is normal for things to go wrong!
Come up with backup plans in case anything does go wrong. You don’t want to be missing out on leads that your website could have generated while it was down. My boss had to put in some extra hours in order to smooth things over and get things into working condition. Great job, Chad!
Be patient
Why isn’t my traffic up? Why are my leads down? Why aren’t people loving the redesign as much as I am? Be patient. Seeing the effects of a website redesign takes time. There might be a dip in traffic for a few days. Prepare yourself for that to happen. For a field service business, you might rely heavily on website generated leads. If that is the case, you might be discouraged if your lead count goes down.
If you’ve redesigned your website, you’ve likely made significant changes to how users interact with your website(user experience or UX). If your lead numbers are down, it might not necessarily be a bad thing, too. You might have less leads, but you might start seeing the quality increase, meaning your website is doing a better job of disqualifying leads that are a bad fit for your business.
Want to know how to get that new website of yours found by people searching for your services? Then download the free eBook, Local SEO for Green Industry Businesses.
