How to Update your Website’s Design

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Website Update

We have been busy giving the Dreamdigital.ie website a new look. We like it, most importantly do you?
At Dreamdigital.ie we are of the belief that a website really needs to be updated at least once a year. Website’s go out of date so fast nowadays that it’s in your businesses interest to have the right design that works for you and more importantly that works for your users. Chances are you’re wanting a new look and feel to your website as you want it to be the best!
Having long been advocates of WordPress, it is very easy to change your website’s theme to give it an instant new look. There are a huge variety of themes that you can choose from for your website from WordPress and others. Choose wisely, does it have everything you need for your website, is it responsive? Before you make the update make sure you have everything backed up. We use the plugin Backup Buddy, it’s easy to install and use. Also, do a physical back-up too, save all of your content. Then you’re good to go.

User Experience (UX) Design

Once you’ve got your new website theme and design working its worth doing a UX (user experience) check as you need to find out if your users are finding what they need on your website, and is it of value to them. Have your users got plenty ways to get in contact and sign up to your newsletter so that they won’t be one time visitors. Is your website mapping right for your users. Are they finding what they need once on the site. A great way of checking this is with Google Analytics. You can analyse your users journey when on your website with User Flow, which goes through visits from landing page to all of the pages that the users go through. There is a wealth of information at your disposal with Google Analytics, where you can gather a lot of data on what your users are doing when on your website. This is the data that is important to your website’s success.

Website Maintenance

website maintenance  A good website needs to be constantly maintained like a well-oiled car so that it works at it’s best all of the time. Based on your website’s Analytics then you can make necessary changes to make it better. Most recently we had to delete and re-direct tags. Here we will show you the easiest way to do this. In the early days of Dreamdigital.ie we had quite a lot of tags accompanying pages and posts. They were all relevant but in hindsight perhaps a little too plentiful. So after a quick tag clean-up the tags were now still ranking but not directing anywhere, which is a 401 not found error, which was bad news and not good for the website. If you need to do a tag clean-up just remember to re-direct all the urls to a new page on your website with the WordPress plug-in Quick Page/Post re-direct plugin. This is the best plug-in that we could find and it works a treat. WordPress makes it very easy to do this as otherwise you would have to go down a more technical route of .htaccess or php, but we didn’t need to as we are always finding the simplest way to do these things, this is it! Install the plug-in, add the old url, then add the new url that you want to re-direct it to and it’s done. Please leave your comments and opinions below. If you need to re-design your website, you know where we’re at. If there is anything that you would like to see covered here do let us know. Thanks!