Redesigning your web site right requires time and effort – and money. That means avoiding potentially costly mistakes is essential. Follow these rules of thumb and you’ll be well on your way to a successful redesign.1. Have a clear goal for your redesignEvery redesign should be the result of a clear business decision. Whether fulfilling a customer need or helping to boost your sales success, you need to know your bottom line for success.2. Know your audienceThe most important goal to keep in mind when planning is connecting with your target audience. Tailor your redesign to appeal to the market you want to reach, and work with your designer to find the perfect market fit. Aiming for “everyone” reaches no one.3. Simplify4. Design with a mobile-first attitude.Smartphones now make up more than 50% of the mobile market in the US, UK and Germany. Count on this trend continuing, and make sure your redesign is mobile-friendly. As a bonus, designing for mobile actually helps you to strip away unneeded features and content. Remember: Simplify.5. Budget your redesign according to expected return on investmentA technically good redesign can still be a losing proposition if it doesn’t match your market and income. Overly-complex solutions are expensive to build and hard to maintain. They will drain resources and reduce profit. Focus instead on things that work for you! Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is your guiding principle for every redesign; use it.6. Include a clear Call To Action (CTA) on every pageAll the traffic in the world won’t help you if visitors leave in frustration. Give visitors an easy way to become customers by prompting a transaction on every page, so also…7. …increase CTA visibility by placing it close to the top of the pageThe top of every web page is the first thing people see – and worth its weight in gold. Scrolling is a conversion killer, so provide a CTA that’s instantly visible on all pages.8. Prompt visitors to “opt-in” on every pageEmail addresses are the breadcrumbs leading to sales success. If you don’t know who is visiting your site, why bother with one in the first place? Make it easy to opt-in, and you will not only have a chance to “close the deal” later, you will also learn about what works for your target group. Then make those improvements.9. Write headlines using the 50/50 ruleA well-worn rule suggests: Put half of your effort into the text and fully half into crafting an effective headline. Live it! Sure, this sounds like good advice. But how do you measure a headlines “greatness”? By comparing it to other headlines for effectiveness! Which brings us to…10. A/B test everything!By routing visitors to different versions of headlines and CTAs, you can directly compare their effectiveness. So make A/B testing your 3-month rule. Find headlines that WORK in real life. Then try to improve on them. Almost nothing else you do will have such an amazing payoff for so little effort.11. Your redesign is not the end!You may be wonderi