If you’re looking to learn more about design websites, please see website at LNCPracticeBuilder.com for plenty of resources to help you build a remarkable practice.

Redesigning your Legal Nurse Consultant website can be a very involved process, and it is important to properly plan and consider the necessary factors that will make or break the redesign. Here is a quick look at a dozen factors that you should be considered whenever you do a site redesign.

1. What is the goal of the redesign?

What do you hope to accomplish? It’s always important to have a clear understanding of your reasons and motivations as they should impact the decisions that you make along the way. Without knowing what your practice goals are the redesign site will still lack direction and you will likely wind up with a website that still doesn’t do justice to your experience or skills as a Legal Nurse Consultant.

2. Is this going to be just a minor upgrade or a complete overhaul?

A redesign could be anything from a minor facelift to an entirely new site. Obviously the time, effort, and cost involved will vary, but first you should determine what types of changes are required for you to meet your practice goals with the design. If a complete redesign is done you will also want to consider to what extent the new design should resemble the old design. Is there branding that you want to remain consistent? If visitors and potential clients are coming back to the site, chances are you will want them to notice the new design without feeling like they’ve never been to your site before. A new LNC website can also give you great material for an email blast or other marketing contact with former clients.

3. What aspects of your current design are most effective?

Most likely there are some things about the current site that work very well and these may be aspects that you would like to keep or incorporate into the new design. It’s a good idea to make a simple list of your likes and dislikes to help with decisions on the new site. It’s also good to look at other sites that you really like and enjoy visiting. Even if it’s the McDonald’s website, make a list of the features you would like to incorporate into your site.

4. What aspects of the current design are not effective?

Building on point #3, if you are redesigning the site you are bound to want to get rid of some specific aspects of the website that you no longer like or are no longer services that you provide. Are there some characteristics of the design that do not accurately portray your LNC practice to new visitors or potential clients?

5. Who are your target users?

During any design process you never want to lose focus on the visitors. By knowing who you are targeting and how you can meet their needs, you will be on your way to building an effective website. What style of design are your users going to like? Attorneys will not like a site that looks homemade or cheap or like you only invested the $4.99 a month GoDaddy charges. They spend lots of money trying to convey a law practice that is impressive to potential clients. Can you really afford to do anything less?

6.  Does the logo/branding need to be changed or updated?

Most likely the website will include some form of a logo or branding. Are these items still up-to-date and will they function effectively with a new design? Do they look like the same “scales of justice and medical symbols that most other LNCs have? If your logo is out-of-date and not attractive, a new design may not do much good if it is still using the same old logo. LNC branding is so important.

7. Should the color scheme change or remain the same?

In point #2, I mentioned that most of the time you will want to keep the website at least looking familiar to repeat visitors. Using a similar color scheme is one of the best ways to accomplish this. A lot of times it can be a good idea to make some minor changes to the color scheme, such as changing shades of colors or adding a few new colors, just to give the site a fresh look.

8. What should be the focal points of the design?

Every design is going to draw attention to certain parts of the page in one way or another. I have blogged about this in other articles about the hot spots in websites. Where your eye goes first on a web page can be directed by how you use color, white space and logo placement. By knowing what you want to emphasize you will have more control over what gets attention from visitors.

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9. How can the navigation be made more effective?

Navigation is one of the most critical elements of a site’s usability. Way to many Legal Nurse Consultants do not know enough about usability and try to design their own websites to save money and end up creating a cheap, confusing mess. If a significant amount of content and/or pages have been added to the site since the last design, it is possible that navigation is no longer optimal. When designing links, downloads and file transfer buttons, think about how potential attorney clients will want to move through the site, and make it as easy as possible for them.

10. How can SEO be improved?

Any time a website is being designed, search engines should be considered. The current design may or may not be search engine-friendly, but the new one certainly should be. Should the current page titles be kept, or could they be done more effectively? How can internal linking be improved? Where can headers be used? This list could obviously go on for a while. As a Legal Nurse Consultant, this all may seem Greek to you. Just like a chem-7 is Greek to a web designer. However, those words mean something to you just as SEO is vital to anyone designing your LNC website. Do not try to be all things to all people. You are a great Legal Nurse Consultant. Let the designers do SEO for you. You won’t regret it.

11. What keywords and phrases are being targeted?

Of course, keywords should be used in titles, headers, anchor text, alt tags, etc. Designing a website without knowing what words and phrases you are targeting means that you are most likely targeting none, at least not effectively. Don’t simply consider the search terms that are being targeted with the current site, make sure that these are the most effective terms to go after. If this makes no sense to you, that’s ok. They make sense to us. Contact LNCPracticeBuilder can help you target your ideal clients and make the most of your resources.

12. What will make visitors want to come back?

Most likely you’ve considered how the new design can make a solid first impression, but what is it about the website that will keep visitors coming back for more? If there is no clear call to action by potential clients and visitors on your site then you are really not accomplishing anything with a website redesign.

For more on building a remarkable Legal Nurse Consulting or Life Care Planning practice website , subscribe to the RSS Feed for the Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, join our LNC/LCP Group on LinkedIn, or friend us on Facebook. We also offer one on one practice coaching as well as amazing LNC/LCP marketing materials, website design and social media page designs. Email us or call (317) 426-1170.

Tags: dozen website tips, factors to consider, website redesign

This entry was posted on August 15, 2011 at 12:40 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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