10 Tips to Relaunch Your Website the Right Way

A Simple Guide to Relaunching Your Website

Your marketing and sales funnel should include at least five elements:

1. A clear marketing message that positions your brand as the obvious choice for prospective customers
2. A mobile-first website
3. Lead generation giveaways
4. A prospect nurturing email campaign
5. A sales email campaign
   

There are many reasons why you should consider redesigning your website after you take the first step to clarify your messaging. The most important is to send the signal to prospects and customers that something is different. Like the story from the Bible, new wine belongs in a new wine skin.

When it comes to relaunching your website or a website redesign, you have two choices:

• Keep your website on the platform or content management system it is currently on, regardless of security concerns or its ease of use, or
• Migrate your website and content to a new platform that is easier to manage, more secure, and will help your business grow.

As you consider your next step, think about the practicality of the software platform you choose or that your website developer recommends. An open-source platform such as WordPress or Joomla is vulnerable to hackers and malware that can take your site offline and damage your business reputation.

Your choices for website builders include:

• Open source content management systems (that require constant maintenance and proxy firewalls services such as Sucuri to protect them from hacking and other vulnerabilities), or
• A proprietary platform is software-based (that requires constant maintenance and software updates) or a SaaS solution (software as a service), where the developer maintains the code.

There are pros and cons to each approach to developing a website. If you want to maintain your site on a popular open-source platform such as WordPress or Joomla and are looking for rock-solid hosting and a simple approach to website management, we recommend:

1. Transfer your domain name to Namecheap.com for greater control over your website and domain name management
2. Take a look at the “Fanatical Support” and affordable website hosting subscriptions offered by CloudAccess.net. 

• One of the features we love the most about Cloud Access is the ability to clone a website into a development instance, make updates, and re-deploy the site back into production. It’s been a time-saver and brings peace of mind.

Once we decided to relaunch the Aespire website, we evaluated two paths: Keep the site on the Joomla open-source platform or invest the time and resources to migrate the site to Aespire Websites Made Simple, our white-labeled, enhanced version of Duda.

Your website relaunch process begins with a visit to Google analytics. If you’ve had a website for a long time, your website will have the product and information pages, lead-generation features, and a blog.

1. Begin your website design by reviewing your website traffic and creating a spreadsheet to sort the website content in two ways:

• Most-visited site content pages
• Most visited blog pages
• Transfer your domain name to Namecheap.com for greater flexibility and control over your website

2. Create a new website content map to plan your menus and website blueprint.

1. Plan your top menu: 4-6 links to direct visitors to services, shop, process, blog, and contact pages at a minimum
2. Plan your website footer: If you have more pages than will fit on the top menu, plan for 3-4 columns of site page lists in the footer of your website. These will be the pages that website content map review found to be popular. Think of a content map as the path people follow from your homepage to content you want them to see)

3. Create a plan for the content you want to migrate.

• Break down your content into blog articles, marketing content, and lead magnets. Analyze the top-visited pages in a spreadsheet and sort the list by the number of visits over 12 months.
• Sorting your content by visits will reveal your most valuable content. Now you have the insights you need to reduce the amount of content on your website.

4. Create a URL migration or redirect strategy.

• Try to keep redirects to a minimum, and plan for a “404 Page Not Found” page with a search box so visitors can find content that moved.
• Because Aespire created a new product to market to nonprofits and community foundations, 40% of the blog content migrated to My Lasting Legacy. This platform empowers community foundations to share stories of generosity to engage the community and fundraise.

5. Create a core marketing message that shows your customer a vision of success

• Your business understands the problem or pain most of your clients face,
• Your solution to the problem you stated, and
• Clearly explain how your clients will feel and what they experience after you solve their problems.

6. Design the look and feel of your new website interface planned visitor experience

• Life and business are complicated for many people, so keep your website design simple and easy-to-read. What is most important is your user experience.
• Create a simple color palette for your website with a couple of primary colors, secondary colors, and vibrant color to highlight your call-to-action buttons
• Select fonts that are easy-to-read on screens. Keep the contrast high between dark fonts and light backgrounds
• If you’re not confident that you can design your website, don’t worry.  Websites Made Simple offers dozens of beautiful website templates that will empower you to build a website of which you can be proud!

7. Select images that show your clients what they will experience and feel after they use your products or services

• (Find photos on a royalty-free photography website or from the millions of photos that you have access to inside Websites Made Simple)
• Show positive outcomes and results that reveal success.

8. Build your pages. Be sure to add:

• Add page meta description, meta title, and a social sharing image so search engines can properly index your website.
• Learn the simple steps for search engine optimization
• On your contact page, a Google location map (an essential for local search)
• A website “fat footer” that contains all the links, contact info, and links that don’t belong in your navigation bar.
• A thin footer at the very bottom with copyright, site map, privacy, and home page links.

9. Preview and test your website on desktop, tablet, and mobile views

• Websites Made Simple makes this easy with a website preview feature.

10. Launch your website and update any external links that might reference page URLS that changed

• Once the website is live, conduct a website audit to check for broken links and other issues. It’s nearly impossible to catch everything before you launch, so the website is a critical aspect of a website relaunch.

Once you’ve launched your website — don’t forget to celebrate!

Finishing Touches for Marketing Website Relaunch

There are always a few finishing touches to add to your website that help visitors make the most of your site and earn their trust:

• Install an auto-updating website privacy policy to minimize risk and maintain compliance. States and countries are proposing laws that will allow consumers to sue businesses anywhere in the US for not having a compliant Privacy Policy. We recommend Termageddon to help you comply with CalOPPA, CCPA, GDPR and more.
• Protect your website from hackers and malware with a proxy firewall. If your current website is hosted on WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other open-source platform, it’s vulnerable to hacking, which could harm your brand and reputation. Sucuri Proxy Firewall successfully protects Aespire clients from threats and vulnerabilities every day.