All websites should be in a process of being redesigned or renovated. This guide will give you some simple steps or a checklist to redesigning your website. We also have four other website redesign tools.

What are the success and failures of your existing site? Gather a few people to get an honest evaluation of your existing site. Write three successes and three failures. Then write down your dreams and goals for the new site.

Why are people visiting your site? Generally they are coming for information or are in need of your company's product or service but there can be many other reasons. List three reasons.

Do you think visitors remember your site? Does it have something that gets attention and is memorable? If he/she does not bookmark your site what will get them back? You should give your visitor something to remember so that he can find his way back to your site. Write one thing that will be remembered about your site.

Who is the target audience? Decide whom you want to target with the site. Who is your customer or audience? Try and get into their shoes and think like they think. What are their needs or points of interest? How can they be served? List the top three categories of people. Write three one sentence descriptions of different people in your target audience. Then write a few words that might interest these people and cause them to respond to your site.

What is the mood or emotion that you want to communicate? Decide on the overall theme and "look and feel" of the site. For example: humor, professional, academic, family, technical, etc. Write three adjectives to describe the way you want your site to feel.

What will make your visitor believe you? Imagine going into an automobile repair shop or Doctors office. What is it that gives you a sense of trust that your car or body will be repaired correctly? A quality site that does what it says it is going to do will help. Also well-written content adds credibility. Perhaps you can guarantee your products. Testimonies by reputable people or companies are perhaps the best way to establish creditability. A list of previous customers is helpful. List a person, company or product that can be associated with your site to add trust and credibility.

How do I redesign my site and write my text with the search engines in mind? Decide on keywords. This is a new concept that really only applies to redesigning or developing websites. It may not even apply to all websites, but to those who are depending on search engines this is an important point. The concept is to get good rankings on search engines with different keywords. Since many pages on your site can be indexed with a search engine this becomes an important strategy in attracting visitors.

Look at your site statistics and see if the keywords entered by your visitors are matching the three target audiences you just listed. If not, then the redesigning needs to help move the site content, design, and promotion towards the target audience. You may be fooled to think that you are getting a high number of visitors but many of them may not be the kind of visitors that are important to your company or organization.

Look at your site statistics and carefully examine the popularity of the pages. You may need to redesign the site so that the pages that you want visited are the most popular. There will always be pages at the bottom of the list but your goal should be to make sure that the important pages are not at the bottom. Changing keywords etc. can boost some of these pages.

Are your visitors coming back and are they spending time at your site? If your visitors are not returning or they are only spending a few seconds at your site then something is wrong. A good site statistics program or service will help you know what your visitors are doing.

Do your visitors feel they are visiting an active site? Sitting in a doctor's waiting room with old newspapers might make you wonder about the competence of the doctor. In the same way, visiting a site that was last updated in 1996 is a sure way to lose visitor trust. When redesigning the website build in ways to keep it fresh, but keep in mind that publishing dates can work against you. Don't create too much extra work for yourself unless you are a workaholic.