In this post, I’ll outline my top 7 website re-design tips for your bridal shop website. If you are thinking of overhauling your website, be sure to read these first.

1. Focus on conversion – The only reason you have a website in the first place is to generate new leads. If your old website wasn’t set up to measure conversion, make sure your new one is. For more information on this, take a look at my other post on Measuring your bridal shop website’s conversion rate .
2. Your website must attract prospects – Your website has to be more than just pretty, it has to attract visitors. Visitors are attracted by remarkable content. Whether that be a great blog post, a cool video, or a special promotion, you must give web surfing brides a reason to visit your website. Once you’ve figured out what that is, be sure to tell the world. Post to Facebook, tweet, write a blog post, share a video on you tube, etc. The bottom line is that your brand now has more real estate that it can claim online and much of it is free. If you do nothing else, be sure to create your local listings at all of the top search engines. Here are the links: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Bing Local. As an added bonus, the effort spent to create your Local listings will help you out in the SEO department as well.
3. Create Landing Pages – Landing pages that visitors usually “land” on first. Often times, these are pages have been optimized for search engines. Since most visitors don’t enter your web site through the front door (home page), make sure that each of your landing pages are well designed with appropriate calls-to-action.
4. Re-use what’s working with your current site – Don’t completely trash your old site if there were parts of it that were working. For example, if you have a significant amount of inbound links to a page, don’t get rid of it. Keep any keyword rich copy that you spent time creating and re-use that as well.
5. Don’t re-invent the wheel – There is a reason why amazon hasn’t done a major re-design of it’s website. It’s because it works. There are plenty of designs out there that work really well. Take inspiration from them.
6. Spend more time creating content than beautiful design – Be sure to include elements to your site that allow you to change and/or produce content on a regular basis. A blog is a great way to keep fresh content on your site. Plus, it shows that your business has a pulse.
7. Include a simple way to measure your site’s effectiveness – We’re bridal retailers and we don’t have time to check our web site analytics every day. That’s why it’s important to have a system in place for measuring your site effectiveness. I keep tabs on a few key numbers: Conversion rate, bounce rate, total visitors. Then I look at my top 10 referring sites to make sure that my marketing spend is in check. These numbers usually give me an idea of how well our site is working.

What are some of your tips for redesigning a web site? Anything you learned last time around? Share your ideas with the readers of this blog by commenting.