RESOURCES » Is your website ready for a facelift? How to prepare for a Website Redesign

Website effectiveness audit

Before you can begin with the whole website redesign process, it is important to take time upfront to determine whether or not there is a real need to redesign your website. What are the issues or reasons you think your organization needs to redesign its website? Evaluate your internal web capabilities by conducting a SWOT analysis. This is where you determine your opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses. Then conduct an analysis of the industry you are in. It is important to analyze and document what your competitors and other businesses in your industry are doing with regards to their websites. This will give you a general overview and some great ideas of what you really want from your website.

Key success factors

Start this process by determining the key success factors for your website redesign project. List any risks or contingencies that could affect the outcome of the project. A step that is often overlooked is to develop a website program charter. The program charter should document the purpose of the project, scope, and overall plan. Document a start date and anticipated end date for the project, project team, communication plan, project deliverables and key milestones. Also document a business case for the project that outlines the quantitative and qualitative benefits compared to the costs and risks of the project.

Define website requirements

It is time to dig in and kickoff the project. Define the high-level objectives, target audiences, initiatives, and key performance indicators for your project. Gather functional requirements from each aspect of the website project. It is important to include all aspects of the web pages to ensure that you get the most from your site and that all requirements can be done with the initial start of the project and not included as a second phase of the site in order to save time and costs.

After gathering requirements, take time to prioritize them. After prioritizing the overall requirements, it is time to look at your infrastructure requirements. Website infrastructure is composed of people, processes, and technology. This is an important step to help determine if there are any gaps in the existing infrastructure. From this step you should perform a GAP analysis to evaluate the requirements and then determine the feasibility of closing each gap. Be sure to adjust your overall requirements document accordingly. Once the project requirements have been determined, it is time to develop and action plan that should document all the internal, external and GAP analyses that you’ve completed, for your website redesign project.

When looking at your current site, you should determine what parts of your site works well and what parts don’t. Look over your analytics and create a list of what parts of your current site seems to work well, try to pinpoint why they’re working well in order to determine why other parts of your site is not performing as it should. Once you’ve identified the other parts of your current site that does not work well, you can then ensure that you focus on these pages so that you do not have the same issue in your redesign project. If there are important parts of your current site that visitors aren’t reaching, look at where they’re falling short in comparison to your more popular content.

You will also need to look at your images on your site. Your images might look out dated, even if your site’s design is current. Maybe you just want your redesign site to portray your company in a different light than your current site does. The images you use make a huge difference.

Develop your new website

Before you set up an appointment with your web designer, be sure you have done a little research and understand what it is that you want from your site with some details that you can provide the designer with in order for them to make a more accurate evaluation of your website redesign project. This information that you should provide to the web designer should include points like:

• Your defined target audience
• The purpose of your website
• How many pages and what type of content should be displayed
• Details about your site structure (if you have an idea of what you prefer it to look like)
• Plan to integrate analytics and reporting tools

Working Mockups

Once you’ve briefed your web designer on your project, always ask them from a mockup as the first step in the design process. This will give you an overview of the look and feel of the website before the whole site is implemented and you are not happy. Each designer should do this without you even requesting this, but working this in your timeline as a milestone will definitely make your feel rest assured. Also ask the designer before hand to supply you with a working example of the site (look and feel already implemented on one page). Some designers tend to give mockups as an image of the page. This only delivers the look of the site but the feel is completely missing.

If the mockup is delivered as an actual HTML document, you can view the design in the web browser where it belongs. With this, you see some of the detail that goes missing in an image, for instance, when you hover over a link or how your navigation works. You can also view it in different screen resolutions and so forth to insure that you are completely happy with the initial design and that you have testes it in the real world early in the process. Just a point to keep in mind, the initial draft will still grow and evolve as the designer continues with the design and development of your site. There will always be some items that’s not yet included in the mock up due to time constraints or the chosen draft page does not include that functionality as yet.

Requiring a working mockup also puts on the onus on the designer to make sure that the design can be implemented seamlessly cross browser and that they are capable of handling the project. There are a lot of cases where a design was signed off based on a Photoshop image, only to find out later in the process that creating a web page that conformed to the design was nearly impossible due to web standard regulations and constraints.

Informing your visitors

Some visitors returning to your website might be upset by a redesign, especially if the structure of the site has changed. It is helpful to announce a redesign prior to actually performing it. Once the redesign is complete, it could be advantageous to have existing visitors linking to the new site in BETA version before launching it. It can be frustrating for a visitor who’s been using your site for months or years to suddenly have to learn how to use the new site. Even if your new site might be more user friendly, it can still be disconcerting for a visitor who’s used to doing things a certain way to suddenly have to change their methods.

Drive traffic to your new website

After the launch of your new redesigned website, it is important to have a strategy in place for how you will promote and drive traffic to your website. Develop an external linking plan. Having many links to your website from external sites will help your website rank better in search engines. Most designers would automatically resubmit your website to search engines so make sure to come to an agreement with your designer to do so if they do not.

Another option you could think about pursuing is pay-per-click search engine marketing as part of your online advertising program. This is especially helpful at the start of your redesign launch. Integrate your website address in your other marketing materials to drive more traffic to your site. The web has really become the main channel for marketing. Your website is limitless and so is the information on your site. You need to develop an ongoing marketing strategy that includes multiple tactics to drive consistent traffic to your website, for instance blogs are a great way to drive quality traffic to your site.

Proactively maintain your website

Most clients think that once their website is launched, that all the work is done and they can sit back and relax. This is just the beginning. Even though the hard work is over and your site has launched, it doesn’t mean your job is finished. Maintaining a website is extremely important. Fresh updates and content is what keeps your targeted visitors coming back to your site. This also influences your Google rankings as Google would either list you higher because of ongoing information being uploaded and updated or they will put you in the back corner because they list you as having outdated content.

You should develop a maintenance schedule to ensure that you are providing valuable and fresh content on an ongoing basis. Discuss this maintenance schedule with your designer and agree on a set fee and timeline. It is very important to monitor your website for internal link rot (broken links) as these reflect poorly on your business over time. It is really difficult, almost impossible, to keep track of external website linking to your site and causing link rot. As your site grows and develops with new content, you may need to re-organize the content. You should also evaluate your overall website on an annual basis. As your business changes, new needs may arise for your web presence.