To be fair, the sample data on this hasn’t even been a month yet, so it will probably change (could go higher or lower) but as of now that’s an instant increase in membership site subscriptions – simply by changing the design.

I first designed MembershipSiteAdvisor.com about 6 years ago. As you can probably tell,  I’m a pretty bad web designer. I was still learning how to put together websites back then. Not much has changed …. at least from the design viewpoint .  I always planned on having a designer create a new site. Unfortunately other projects kept coming up and I always put the new design on the backburner. The funny thing is, it only took about a day to implement the new design from our web design team, and that included our new blog. Here’s what it cost and some tips for working with outsourced designers.

Before and After shots….

So what do you think? I’m kinda embarrassed  when I look at the old design now. My wife had been telling me to “update that ugly thing” for years now.

Break down steps

Step 1: Hired logo designer to create the website logo. Most of the time I will just have the website designer create the top banner of the site, but if you want it to look a little more professional, create the logo first and then have the site designer match the site design to your logo design.

Step 2: Gave the new logo to the website designer and they built the template for us. They provided about 3 or 4 different mock-ups. Always get several mock-ups.

Step 3: Because we rank very high in the search engines we instructed the designer to keep our text the same, and to not replace any text with an image of text (it had to be kept as actual text).

Tip: To help improve conversion rates we also had the designer allow for a “Video of the Week” to be placed on the right hand side of the site. Videos increase conversion rates.

Logo cost: $80

Website design: $150 (It’s not normally this cheap. We had a number of other sites designed, which brought down the overall cost. A good designer might charge around $250).

TOTAL MAKE-OVER: $230

We outsourced the work via Elance.com

Bottom line is that a better design almost always means more sales. It’s worth the small investment to have it professionally designed or use a professional template.

Talk soon,
Ansel

www.MembershipSiteAdvisor.com

We tried to migrate the data over from our old blog ( http://membershipsiteadvisor.com/blog ), but it was turning out to be a huge job. So, to keep things simply (if that’s possible in the techo world) – I decided to start off fresh. The old blog will remain, so if you are looking for some of our archieved articles feel free to search the old blog.

Hope you enjoy our new blog.

Talk soon,

Ansel