Experience on revamping an existing website

Our website has become outdated and the UI is now like 0.5 version in the web 3.0 world. We are now working on the new website. 

Our website is highly Search Engine Optimized and so we have to be very careful in our website design. The structure of our website should not be affected at the same time we have to improve the performance. 

There are two approaches in organizing the website. One is by highlighting the major domains that we are having and grouping the products under that category. The other way is providing links like Products, Solutions, Support etc. and listing the products and groups inside. Most of the major solution providers are following the second approach. But one of our main competitors is following the first approach. We are also following the first approach for the past Seven years.

We are categorizing the page into four.

• home page,
• main level pages or solution pages
• product home page
• product inner pages

The home page and the main level pages will come at the top for high level keywords. The product index page and the feature pages will come at the top for the product specific keywords.

We are tracking few hundred key phrases for the past Seven years and most of them are coming in top three positions or on first page. Now we have a big challenge that without affecting the SERP we have to do the new website release. In addition, we have a challenge that the new website should have very good UI as one of our other brands has a well-established user interface (a SaaS service).

We are doing a number of test (A/B testing, Number of click on a page, loading time, etc.) for the new pages.
 

We are using Google website optimizer for the A/B testing. In this we are comparing the old page and new page performance for the primary conversion. Once that is completed, we are using CrazyEgg tool for testing the number clicks we are getting in the old and new pages. Also we are working on the time spent by the user on our website.

We are doing these tests for few top product pages. We went for few designs and we settled with the top performing UI. Now the challenge is to polish the UI so that the look and feel and the usability of the pages are good. We have done three designs and finally we settled with the third one. One of the feedback was “it was just atrocious. I think it's worth just starting again from scratch.”

Here comes the big challenge for us. The new site is working on the conversion perspective but the UI standard is pathetic (from the comments we have received).

We are going to work more on the UI and then we will be rolling it out in the next couple of weeks. We have one more work pending is the page loading time. This can be started only when we finalize the UI. Over and above we have not yet worked on the content. We are doing the UI changes only. But it is supposed to be content as well as UI changes.

In the new design also we are following the same. This introduces a lot of limitations. Any how we have completed the design and make it ready. I hope the next couple of weeks are going to be very challenging as we are going to revamp it for better UI!

Saravanan