If your website looks like the one above you either have really, really, really particular brand following… or it might be time for a website redesign.

There is never a perfect checklist or milestone your website needs to meet in order to justify a redesign. It varies from person to person and even site to site. In this blog post, I’ll cover some of the most common reasons that I’ve experienced first-hand from over ten years in the web design space.

While your website may not check all the issues, I hope to make it broad enough to equip you with enough evidence to convince your stakeholders (even if it’s yourself) that you are due for a makeover.

For content breakdown, I’ve split reasons for change into the following buckets:

1. Obviously scary warning signs
2. Increase in traffic
3. Being compliant with laws

Preface: A redesign doesn’t have to be scary.

To start off it’s okay to feel overwhelmed or perhaps scared to redo your website. This can be due to limits on your time, fear from past site rebuilds that went south, or perhaps you simply fear losing your content. The following list of concerns isn’t exhaustive but it serves to say that we understand why you may be hesitant.

Throughout the rest of the article, I help to demystify some of your concerns and offer some, hopefully, compelling examples that may convince you that the time for change is now.

Limits of Your Time

This is the easy part. Simply by partnering up with a website company that already has established relationships in place, you can count on them to handle the strategy planning and take it from there. If you don’t already have a WordPress agency in mind, I highly recommend us at WebDevStudios. If your business is on the small to medium side, a website redesign from Maintainn, which is owned by WebDevStudios, will be a perfect fit.

Being burnt in the past

In my ten-plus years of web development experience, I’ve heard countless horror stories of projects going wrong. Though you can’t control everything, joining forces with the right design and development partner with a proven track record should help to put to ease your concerns. Don’t allow the past to deter you from creating a successful future.

Fear of losing your content

Unlike other platforms in the past, WordPress is what is known as a content management system, not just simply a website builder. The way your website looks and feels is handled through themes on your website. This is the part you are redesigning, not your content. Think about it like this: if your website content is an engine in your car, you can swap the body and still keep the same engine. All your pictures, posts, products, and more will migrate just fine. (Whew!)

Bucket One: Scarily Obvious Signs

It’s difficult to make content updates.

If you can’t update your website, what good is it for? As a content management system, WordPress should make editing your website be as easy as riding a bike. Something to consider is that if you have an older WordPress installation, major advancements have been made towards how you can design and manage your website, be it Gutenberg for custom websites or Beaver Builder for smaller businesses. A newly redesigned website will provide you with the latest tools to allow you to feel empowered to make content updates when YOU want.

It just doesn’t express who you and your company are anymore.

Let’s face it: many of the fashion trends from the early 1990s don’t look so great in the 2020s. Saying your website doesn’t express who you are today doesn’t admit that your old website was bad when it came out; it’s just time to update your digital wardrobe.

Other Scarily Obvious Reasons

• You have a new product line.
• You have a new company direction.
• It looks like an amateur made it.
• It takes a long time to load.
• It’s difficult to use.
• The words “flash is required” are anywhere on your website.
• It lacks a friendly mobile experience.
• It’s lacking key features, like the presence of social media integrations.

Bucket Two: Increase Traffic and Conversion

If your website was on Tinder, would visitors be swiping left?
– Laura Coronado, WebDevStudios Marketing Strategist

More traffic = More Customers = More Sales = More $$$

The golden rule of a website’s value, from a business perspective (even if you are a nonprofit), is more traffic means more users served. There are a countless number of ways to drive more traffic to your website, be it SEO, ad campaigns, guerrilla warfare, or a magic ritual. One thing for certain, an outdated and poorly designed website will impact how much money you make at the end of the day.

How Design Affects Traffic

Did you know that your site’s design can make an impact on your SEO and thus affect your traffic? Since 2015, mobile-friendliness has been among the many factors that Google uses when it ranks websites in search results. Another design element that affects your search ranking is your site’s load speed, while this can be influenced by your site’s hosting. Also, a poorly designed website that uses unnecessarily large graphics can cause people to abandon your website in as little as two seconds! To read more on this topic, check out “5 Ways SEO & Web Design Go Together” by Search Engine Journal.

How Design Affects Conversion

The internet has matured past the point of anything truly being first to market for any standard consumer goods or services. With that, your average customer is savvy and aware that if they don’t like what you are offering, they’ll just go somewhere else. To keep visitors browsing and ultimately converting them to paying customers, your design needs to create a pleasant user experience by making content easy to find and visually pleasing. It’s not just the product or service your site is offering. It equally matters as much how you are offering it.

Bucket Three: The Law Forces Me to

If you aren’t convinced by now that you may need a new website. perhaps civil law may convince you. For the better part of 35-plus years, laws dictating how websites are to be designed and behave were mostly absent at any large scale. This is no longer where we are today. You know you need a website redesign when compliance with the law dictates it.

Accessibility

I recently wrote a blog post titled, “5 Ways to Make Your WordPress Site More Accessible.” In it, I covered not only tips to better deliver your content but also legal and monetary considerations you should be aware of if you are ignoring accessibility in your website’s design.

Since 2017, accessibility lawsuits related to website accessibility, which is directly impacted by your website’s design, have doubled every year with as many as 3200-plus in 2019 alone. I highly recommend you give my article a read, but in summary, by not coming into compliance with good site design, you could leave yourself liable for punitive damages.

Cookie Compliance

Even if you have a nice-looking website that meets your needs and is accessible to others, that still may not be enough. Starting October 1, 2020, any website that has European Union (EU) consumers needs to conform to enhanced cookie compliance laws. It’s quite common for third-party themes to include third-party tracking cookies that are not compliant with EU regulations. Any redesign should take this into consideration what tools and resources are used in your website’s build.

The End

Whether the need for a website redesign is obvious, stems from a desire to boost traffic and sales, or compelled by legal reasons, I hope you found this post informative. Just remember that with the right partner, a redesign doesn’t have to be so scary! If you’re ready to get started, reach out to us at WebDevStudios, or for smaller businesses, contact Maintainn.

The post Scary Warning Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign appeared first on WebDevStudios.

None of these considerations are outside the realm of common sense, but the excitement of redesign opportunities that become available when building a fresh website can make us tend to forget why we need something new or who we’re doing it for. So, let’s get into it. These are the rules for your redesign.

Rule 1: Have a Reason.

Have a valid reason for your redesign. “I want something new,” isn’t a valid reason. “Our current website is not accessible,” and, “We don’t have a mobile responsive design,” are valid reasons.

Keep in mind that the level of redesign should be in line with the weight of the reason. For example, “We’ve completely changed our identity and branding,” would carry more thought, weight, and work compared to, “We have accessibility contrast issue on our current site.” You must address accordingly.

Rule 2: Do Your Research.

Do the research first. You don’t get a new site design until you know who it’s for and what that group of people expect. The younger your demographic, the more you might skew social or mobile, whereas older generations might have accessibility concerns or expect something more “traditional.” Everything that happens in the design will be influenced by this data.

Rule 3: It’s Not for You.

You have clients, investors, subscribers, and consumers of your content. The website is for them. Leave your preconceived notions of what is “good” or “bad” about your new design, and think about your demographic.

Rule 4: You Probably Don’t Need That.

There are a lot of new trends. Every day, I find at least one new thing that someone is trying out. The difference between those companies and you is that their brand is defined by cutting-edge progress in web development. I imagine you need something to inform and support your users long term. So before you request a feature, ask yourself, “Do I need it?”

Rule 5: There Is Such a Thing as Too Much.

You don’t need to fit everything on the homepage, above the fold. You need a plan—small bits of calculated targeted content to get the job done. You have seconds to funnel your users, not minutes. You have a whole website in which to put that extra content.

Rule 6: Unless You’re Amazon, Your Navigation Doesn’t Need To Be That Complex.

Unless you’re selling loads of products that require complex search algorithms and boundless numbers of categories and organizational strategy, you don’t need 90 pages and 14 drop-downs in your navigation. I imagine your core business could be summed up in a half a dozen parent pages, which is a clean and simple alternative. If you’ve done your research, you should know where your users are expecting to go and what they’re expecting to find.

Now You Know.

Rules one, two, and three are really the holy grail of design rules, although all of these are heavily based on common sense. So instead of reiterating the importance of them, I thought I’d expand a little on rule two, which often gets forgotten or ignored—partially, perhaps, because of time, but most often because the task itself can feel overwhelming and you may not know where to start. Here is a fantastic set of places to get you started on your research journey.

• Optimizely: Use simple A/B testing.
• Similarweb: Compare your website to similar websites in the industry.
• Google Trends: Analyze trends in your area.
• Consumer Barometer: Determine how people use the web.
• Google Analytics: Analyze your user interactions and way points.
• Typeform: Gather survey data quickly.

The post Dev Shortie: Rules For Your Redesign appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Here are 13 reasons why it’s time.

1. Your Branding Has Changed

The most obvious reason for a redesign is that your company’s identity has changed.

Circumstance: You throw some dollar bills at a new logo or a new suite of fancy printed materials. That’s fantastic, congrats, but your website still reflects your old logo or brand materials.

New identity updates are a great time to unveil a sparkly new website to go along with it. In an ideal world, you roll out everything all at once. But in the real world, you can roll your brand updates out in phases. Either way, get it done; update your brand 100% or not at all. Discrepancies can hurt your bottom line and brand awareness. If you’ve made any updates to your brand that fundamentally changed the way the public perceives your company, you need a new website.

2. You Didn’t Think “Internet on Mobile Devices” Was Going to Be a Thing

Let me tell you a little story. Back in 2007, I had a client that had just rebuilt their entire website—spent the time and money to re-infrastructure their entire site from the ground up with a new design, new sitemap, and new SEO efforts. The thing looked pretty good. Despite the fact that responsive internet had been a thing for a few years at that point, he was certain that “mobile internet was just a fad.” A few weeks later, the first generation iPhone was released, cementing mobile internet and the need for a 100% responsive website.

Don’t be that guy. You don’t have to chase trends, but you need to be aware of how and where your website is used. Having a mobile-ready website has never been more important than it is today. As of Q3 of 2018, mobile traffic represents more than 52% of all internet traffic. You cannot afford to not have a mobile-ready website. If your website looks the same on your smartphone as it does on your Windows 95 desktop, you need a new website.

3. I Have a Collection of Snails Faster Than Your Website

I’ve mentioned this before on previous blogs of mine, but you have, at most, seven seconds for your website to load and grab your user’s attention before they’re likely to just bail altogether. With mobile traffic being so important, that number is even more important on slower mobile internet speeds—3G for example. Internet that slow really depends on your target demographic, but you get the point.  Google’s Lighthouse will test for this. I really don’t feel that I need to get into the details; it’s pretty self-explanatory. If I can sing the entire Wicked soundtrack before your website loads, you need a new website.

4. Half of Your Pages 404

I get it. The older your website ages and the more content you add, change, or remove, the more of a mess you make. It’s inevitable and expected. You can only do so much. The problem is that most users don’t understand or even care about the finer points of URL redirection or what a 301 code is. If your URL, according to the search engines, directs users to a web page that doesn’t exist, your website is broken and needs an audit. Nine times out of ten, you can resolve and redirect those URLs just fine without much problem. But if you have more 404s than you have pages, it’s time to burn your website down, treat yourself to a new one, and account for all of those 404s in your rebuild.

5. I Just Can’t Find Anything!

I’m talking specifically about organization and flow. Current website design trends take into consideration the philosophy that “less is more,” and the direction/navigation/call-to-actions should be clear and easily accessible. Ten years ago, it was popular to use fifteen content sliders, forty-seven modals, and paragraphs for days. Today, that’s not the case. I might argue that your website content needs an overhaul before you get a website redesign. It’s important to make sure that your users are finding what they need and are spending time on your website. If your Google Analytics tell you that your bounce rate is high (roughly 56-70%+), you might need to take a good hard look at your website. Pour yourself a celebratory glass of shandy because you need a new website. And… it… will… be… glorious!

6. You’ve Been Hacked More Than Zero Times in the Last 10 Years

Okay, that’s a low bar. Chances are that everyone has been hacked in one way or another over the years. Security and vulnerabilities pop up on the regular. However, if your site leaves you at risk of any privacy or security intrusions, you should take a look at your setup. Technologies that are typically considered “legacy” often slow down on active development or security patches. Look at what your website is built on and whether or not there are reported issues with it. Even older versions of WordPress can leave you vulnerable, so always err on the side of updating. They’re constantly looking to keep you safe with fairly-continuous active development, especially when security and privacy are concerned. If you:

• Can’t update your website’s framework
• Don’t know what your website is built on
• Have been hacked in any way in recent years
• Are unable to find a security statement from your host provider
• Require a 3.5″ floppy disk to save your new blog post

You need a new website.

7. TL;DR

Your website has too much content. No way I’m going to get through all that. Too long; didn’t read, and I guarantee that most of your user base is in the same boat. The only acceptable place for larger amounts of content are white papers, articles and blog posts, and even then, within reason. I’m busy. I have things to do, important things; I don’t have all day to absorb 22 pages of your thoughts on spreadsheet data entry. Your content really needs to be quick, targeted, well-articulated and broken into easily digestible parts.

*Pause for digestion.*

Your About page doesn’t need a 52-page dossier on your company’s history. I need to know simply: who, what, when, where, why, and your goals for the future. I might need a little info on each of your “notable” employees or information about your location, if that’s important. But if a page on your website takes more than five minutes to read (fifteen for articles), it’s too long. You need a good hard look at your content and to think about a new website.

8. I Can’t Find You on Any Search Engine

We all know that search engine results rankings are important. If you don’t show up on the first page or two, you’re likely to get lost on the internet. But choosing the best inline-keywords only goes so far, and in fact, I’ve still seen websites that utilize meta keywords which were deprecated some time ago. The truth of it is that so much more goes into determining where you fall in search results and how search engines find your website in the first place. As long as you’re updating your content continuously, you should be considered relevant to search engine spiders.

If search engines can’t find you, my bet is that your website doesn’t adhere to web standards, isn’t accessible, or isn’t set up in such a way that search engines can make sense of the content enough to properly rank you. This is probably more than a content issue. This could be a systemic issue that needs to be resolved. If you’re doing all you can to boost your rankings and are failing, I think it’s time you rebuild your website.

9. Your Goals Have Changed

This one is less obvious if you’ve been looking at the same website, or been with the same company for a while, but still important. You might have a relatively up-to-date website, maybe to match your new branding, but perhaps your demographic shifted after that rebrand, or you’ve pivoted to combat market changes. Either way, if your website is no longer effective at capturing users, it might be time to redesign or rebuild. There are lots of platforms out there to test before you commit, like Optimizely for A/B testing, and dipping a toe in the internet waters to find the best solution for your target. The important thing is that you keep an eye on your analytics and conversions, test, and if you’re not able to achieve the results you need with what you have, you might need a new website.

10. Your Website Looks Like a Vision Board

We all made those when we were kids, right? A collage of magazine cutouts and old receipts from Chuck E. Cheese’s would declare our intentions for the future. It works in that setting, since the idea of “putting it out into the universe” is all that’s required. We could make it as messy and overlaid as we wanted. On the internet, however, clarity is key. If your website resembles a vision board, you’ve got some issues to resolve. Chances are you’re dealing with “bad code” or “old code” that can be fixed with a little TLC and some elbow grease. Take some time to organize your content a bit better, reorganize, and clean things up. But if despite your intervention, your website just ends up looking like a Jackson Pollock painting, you have deeper problems that would probably take more work to dig through and fix than it would to start over. It might be time for a new website.

11. Your Website is Almost Back in Style, and Not In a Good Way

We all remember the old Geocities websites. No real conventions had been set in place yet, and the options were quite literally endless—tables and GIFs and Marquees, OH MY! Design trends have evolved over the years quite a bit, though we’re starting to see a trend into brutalist websites, which really plays off of what is acceptable and unacceptable on the web and challenges the currently accepted conventions. It does what any art movement does, questions the status quo. That said, your crappy website is not back in style, even though it looks that way. Under the brutal exterior, these sites utilize the current trends in code development, understand security and performance, and follow the rules required for search engines and users to find the site in the first place. Your website belongs back in 2001, but if you just LOVE that style, rebuild it right and get on the brutalist train.

12. Your Website Is More Than Four or Five Years Old

This one’s simple. Things change. Quickly. If your website is more than even a couple years old, I’d consider giving it a face lift. If it’s older than that, it’s time for a redesign and rebuild. At a certain point, band-aids, patches, and face lifts, like with people, don’t turn out great. You most certainly do not need all those flashy bells and whistles that you saw on the Awwwards website, but you do need to catch up, stay current, and rebuild your website to last you another several years, at the least. You owe it to your brother’s bratty children.

13. It Just Looks Old. You Know It’s Time.

Sometimes you just know. Maybe you don’t know why, but you know it’s time. It could be a combination of any of the things above, or it just feels outdated. Maybe it is heavily skeuomorphic circa Apple 2003 or just hasn’t been touched in a few years. I personally revamp my code base or website design every year. Things change way too fast to keep up with the current trends, and frankly, why would I want to? I don’t need a fad website, I need a future-proof website.

So, Let’s Get Going…

Before you take a drive to rebuild-town, use your best judgment. Audit your website, your content, and your sitemap. Take a look at your goals, your SEO, and your bounce rates. Compare your brand and your website. If you don’t like what you see, feel confused or uncertain of what you’re looking for, or you just need a second pair of eyes, we can help. Just give us a shout.

It might be time to rebuild your website.

The post 13 Reasons Why It’s Time for a Website Redesign appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Of course, design is a fragile balance of good design and meeting client expectations and tastes. Their sensibilities and “good design” don’t always go hand-in-hand, but these recommended questions can help guide you through the process and shape the design that fulfills goals while keeping your creative expectations well-fed.

10. Why redesign, or what are you trying to accomplish?

The assumption here is that the client you’re working with already has some internet presence. Often, a client only ever wants a new website because their old site “isn’t great.” That’s an entirely valid reason to want something new, but dig deeper. “It isn’t great” doesn’t help you design this new site.

Determine what they’re seeking to gain from the redesign. Does the client expect that a new, flashy website will increase web traffic or help with newsletter signups? Or, is the client trying to address past user complaints about certain aspects of the site not working? Patiently work with the client to determine what “isn’t great” really means to them, the site, and their users; and you will get a better baseline idea of what they need.

This question may not inform color or type choices, but it tells you where to focus.

9. Who’s the audience?

Once you know why, you can ask, “For whom?” You need to know your client’s audience. For example, if the primary demographic is mainly teens, the design or structure would be much different than a site whose audience is in their 40s. We often forget this, because a designer’s tool belts are current trends – trends informed by the largest growing group of internet users: Millennials. These trends might not necessarily be good user experience (at first), but they are what the internet generally may expect to see or how they may expect to interact with your site.

8. Where do your users view your website?

You know your client’s audience now, but you need to know how they are viewing the client’s site. Is it from desktop computers, tablets, phones, or other? Knowing the platform tells you where to focus. Of course, you want to make sure the experience is responsive and caters to all platforms. But let’s be honest, if 80% of site traffic is coming from small tablets (iPad Mini perhaps), you can bet your buns I’ll be optimizing for that.

In this thought experiment, this means that we can expect the site to be viewed on smaller screens, perhaps on mobile networks (slower speeds) and maybe 1000px at a time. You may also need touch support, which might inform what elements you need or don’t need, or how they may react on different platforms.

You may not also be developing the website, but you should still think about how the site will render. The final render will help determine how much imagery or what type of layout you can or should use, and how much should be visible in the viewport at any given time.

7. What do you love and hate about your current site?

From here I determine the client’s color palette and type choice. I NEVER ask them outright what colors or fonts they like. I want to make sure that Comic Sans and taupe aren’t in my new Style Guide, but I also want to ensure that we’re not ignoring any considerations for age or accessibility.

Asking what they love and hate might tell you that they like red or serif fonts. They might hate the color yellow and how the buttons look on their current site (so very Web 2.0).

6. What sites do you like, and why?

It’s always helpful to gather a list of sites clients like. These tastes tell me a lot about how the client thinks and whether or not the things they like serve a purpose for their users in this case. I will almost always form a snapshot of the aesthetic the client likes. Contemporary, modern, fun, funky, sterile. It is up to me to determine whether or not it works for the website’s purpose, but how, based on the type of sites they like, information could be organized.

5. Where’s the content coming from?

So you have an idea of how the site might look, but you need to figure out where the content’s coming from, who’s generating it, or who’s maintaining it.

If the site you’re designing has the same content as the old site, then you have a pretty good idea of what you’re working with. If they’re up for reworking the content, who’s generating it? This may tell you that you shouldn’t expect a lot of quality images, or long form text. If someone’s producing new content but not maintaining it after the project, who’s responsible for that? Hopefully, you’re designing a website that’s not entirely reliant on X number of images or X paragraphs of text for every page. This might be the case early on, but as the site ages or new content is added those numbers may change; so it’s always good to keep that in mind.

4. Describe the process for conversion as it is now.

All sites, whether they be e-commerce website or informational, have some measure of success in the form of a conversion. For an e-commerce site, it’s sales. For a blog, it might be shares or newsletter subscriptions. For a community network, it’s signups. Conversions could count for something as simple as, “this page was viewed.” But you need to know how the client tends to expect users to use the site, so you can make it easy or define a flow.

Knowing the current process also provides a measure of success when you compare conversions to monthly visitors to a site. If 5% of visitors are converting as expected, chances are there’s something broken with the flow. Enter designer.

3. Who are your competitors (if any)?

It’s good to know who you might be battling for attention, so you can design to stand out. Of course, it may not matter to the client, but it is always important for users. I wager that if you (the user) were presented with three websites all doing the same thing, there would be the site you dismiss because it feels out of date. Another site you dismiss because it tries too hard or doesn’t feel real (I tend to see most sites that use a theme as stock filling this bucket). Finally, there would be a site you select to use because it’s nicely designed, but clean and personal.

You can, in my opinion, consider any competitors that fill the first two buckets a non-issue. Though, this is speaking solely of design. Word-of-mouth still carries a lot of clout.

2. In six months, how would you measure the success of this project?

A client’s goals may change over time, but it’s good to ask how they expect to measure success from a new design. It could be increased conversions, higher site traffic, or simply happier users. In any case, knowing this is good because it may differ from question 10 above, but it’s equally important and for the same reasons.

I always ask this toward the end of a design discovery, as it comes after the client’s given some thought to the existing (or new) site.

1. What’s your favorite ice cream?

Read the room of course. Sometimes these questions don’t garner confidence from the client, but I always ask something along these lines. What’s your favorite movie, song, food, sport, etc.? This can be directly related to the website being designed, based on some tangent the client introduced, or entirely unrelated. The reason I ask these types of questions is two-fold.

1. It tells me something about the client that may help me inform or describe design decisions in a way that the client may jive with.
2. It lets the client know that this process will be fun and not a chore. The design process should be taken seriously, no doubt, but it doesn’t have to be something you all slog through. Think of it as a game and everyone wins.

Go forth and conquer!

Take these and mold them to fit the client. Obviously, a new site design won’t have existing content, and they can’t hate or love a thing that doesn’t yet exist, but you could rephrase those to apply to your project or add your own.

Throughout the design discovery process, I rarely, if ever, ask direct design questions. Asking what they like is not the same as, “Do you like rounded or squared buttons?” These are also not things they should be thinking about. Keep the client at a high level at all times. They are paying you to design with their interests in mind, so those things are (and should be) up to you.

A related note:

On a related note, you may receive negative feedback about your designs. It’s important to defend designs and inform the client of your intentions, but not criticize their “lack of design knowledge.”

1. Explain to the client what you did, just in case they missed the purpose. Sometimes static designs can lose some of their intended flair in translation.
2. Explain the purpose of the design decision and how it applies to their client or aligns with notes you took during discovery. It may be that there was a misunderstanding, but, perhaps more likely, the client was looking at the design personally and not as their user base. This is very easy to do, and I am guilty of it day-to-day.

If you’ve explained your reasoning and the client still pushes back, then it’s on to plan B. Hopefully the previous discussion about what, why, and how clarifies intent and informs a design revision without any negative feelings on either side.

The post 10 Questions You Should Ask Your Clients Before You Start a Redesign appeared first on WebDevStudios.

WebDevStudios is thrilled to announce the launch of the new and improved TheSportsGeek.com! Working with Kevin McClelland, editor of The Sports Geek, was exciting. The challenge that he presented included the requests for a fresh redesign, a logo refresh, and a full-site-rebuild on WordPress. The original website was somewhat outdated, text-heavy, and in need of some visual pizzazz to better represent the energy of the client.

Admittedly, I’m not much of a sports guy, but that doesn’t prevent me from designing a great experience while concentrating on the important part: the content. We needed a plan focused on engagement and energy, while retaining the “sports” feel, so as to not alienate current users.

The Process

The first thing you might notice about the old site is that it’s plain; there is a lot of white and red. The header takes up the majority of “the fold,” and the site wasn’t mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly—a design that hearkened back to the early aughts.

“With the world switching to viewing websites on mobile devices, I knew I needed an updated and responsive website, but I was hesitant on getting a new website designed,” explains Kevin. “I thought the process would be confusing and difficult for someone like me who doesn’t have a background in design or coding. Thankfully the WebDevStudios team made the process very easy.”

Kevin came to the design with inspiration drawn from various sports, sports news, and sports betting sites like CBS Sports and Fantasy Pros. Three things they all had in common was that they were content robust, generally monotone, and very modular. So I started there and extrapolated.

“Every step of the way was carefully planned out, and there was an entire team working together to ensure I was happy with all aspects of the website,” Kevin says. “Communication was top notch throughout with weekly calls to keep me updated, and any of my questions or inquiries answered very quickly.”

The Layout

The typical user wasn’t spending much time on the site. Once signed up, users had the opportunity to receive emails with a bulk of fresh content. So, the primary goal was clear that user retention was important, but more so, user acquisition. The majority of the content on the old site was being served up long form without much imagery or differentiation in content. I needed ways to break things up. Enter the card.

A simple but effective way to break up content throughout the site, this layout solution comes in two forms: a “feature” visible on most pages and a general-purpose “card” visible everywhere else. Even the widgets are compartmentalized to keep things separate, but together.

Every part of this site was designed to create a hierarchy and separation between content; thus, influencing user focus, something that was sorely lacking in the old site’s layout.

The Colors

Red plays only a minor role in the new site design. Instead, blue and yellow take center stage, which are colors commonly used in the sports world.

I needed to keep things calm (blue) while bringing focus to elements throughout the site (yellow). Success!

The Header

The old site’s header, video, call to action, and a button is persistent on all pages, which is fine, but taking up that much real estate on a page can be problematic, especially on mobile devices.

Here, I’ve decreased that space requirement, while also giving users the ability to hide this block (not entirely) to clean things up a bit. Though the magic of javascript and cookies, that state (open or closed) is saved for the user; so, they do not constantly have to open or close that header block. Ahh, the internet… What can’t it do?

The Logo

The logo took shape after the site was well into the design phase, which is a fun little design challenge. We were left with a very specific space to fill in the header (longer than it was tall), a limited color palette given the darker blue background, and the need to somewhat refer to the original logo of the old site.

I kept things angular and in the vein of the old logo, but with a little extra flare, grabbing inspiration from existing sports logos, news sites, and for good measure some tech sites (for the geek).

The final logo design came out of our fifth choice, after a few minor tweak and solidifying the type… Voilà!

“When it was time to launch the website, I was eager to see what my followers/fans thought of the new design,” Kevin shares with us. “Within just a few hours of going live, I had numerous emails and tweets from people letting me know how much they loved the re-design; and since then, I’ve still had nothing but positive comments.”

Conclusion

Given several, albeit minor restrictions, we were able to give The Sports Geek a fantastic new look and feel without ignoring its roots. We’ve organized the content and provided a better mobile experience for those catching up on the fly. If at the end of the day, site traffic and new-user acquisition has improved by even a fraction, we’ve done our job. And that’s the power of design.

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