Using analytics to aid you in your redesign

After your website has been live for a certain time you may decide it’s time for a redesign. You may have added a lot of additional content on over the past year or so and feel that the site is looking a little cluttered and disjointed, or you may have changed your logo and colour ways and want to reflect this in the site.
When doing a redesign it is important to always think about what your customers will want on the site not just what looks good. Using tracking and analytical software such as Google analytics will allow you to drive down in to your website and find out about issues with certain pages or even elements on a page.
In Analytics you can set up a number of different ways to track what your visitors do when they visit your site. You can also set up your own goals such as completions of a brochure request or call back. This will allow you to compare week by week or month by month etc. to see how your site is performing.
You will be able to check which pages a visitor landed on, how long they spent on the site and which pages they left on. If you see a particularly high bounce rate for one page, or notice that everyone is leaving when they get to a certain point on your site it often points to an issue with that page. It may be that it is not loading correctly or it could be that the content on the page is not sufficient.