It’s a new year, and you’re tired of your web site’s design. Could it be time for a change? But wait—before you touch your site, review the slides below, from a recent HubSpot webinar, Website Redesign: Tips & Tricks.

If you don’t protect your website assets, it’s possible your redesign will actually cause a drop in traffic and leads, Mike Volpe, Vice President of Marketing, explains. “You’ll…have wasted time, effort, and money,” he warns, by destroying your website assets, including “removing valuable content, losing the value of inbound links, losing keyword rankings, and changing good conversion tools.”

Website Redesign Tips

According to Volpe, the right reasons to redesign your site are “getting found by more prospects and converting more prospects, into leads and customers.” He states that “‘Branding’ might be a good reason…”, only if it will drive these other goals.

Volpe recommends these tips if | when you redesign your website:

1. Audit your website, and make sure to protect your key assets.
2. Spend resources on creating content, more than beautiful design.
3. Make it easy to run conversion experiments.
4. Make it easy to measure results (concentrate on these key metrics: traffic, leads, and sales).

Ways to Protect Your Website Assets

Volpe advises protecting your website assets, in these ways:

• If you change domains, use a 301 redirect for each individual page. Don’t apply a 301 redirect for all pages, globally.
• Have a permanent redirect.
• Identify all URLS with assets (content, keyword rank, links, conversions) and:
  Keep this content on the new website.
  301 Redirect old URL to the new URL for that page.
  Maintain SEO/content characteristics.

For more information on ways to audit your website assets, check out Volpe’s slides, Website Redesign for 2010.