10 Redesign Tips

Everyone loves lists. While this is not a “top ten” list, these ten redesign tips will help you as you begin the process of your next site redesign.

1.	Plan Ahead – I recently completed a list of changes for a customer site. The changes were needed but the way they approached it resulted in more effort on our part and a less effective change process. If you think you need to revamp your site, think through what you need and why. That may sound very basic, but I’m surprised how many people jump into a redesign without a plan.Part of planning involves all facets of your business. Well constructed marketing plans will mesh seamlessly with your Web presence. A monthly organizational theme that corresponds with products, services or perhaps mission and vision is a great way to maintain centralized messaging and often will make it very easy what marketing needs to happen on the Web side of things.
2.	Have Clear Goals – Make a list of what works on your site and what doesn’t. If possible, conduct usability tests to see where customers might get confused or bail on your site. You need to be clear about what issues you have with both design and function rather than assuming you know or simply changing for the sake of change.
3.	Remember Project Management – This may seem like a repeat of the first two, and it is related. But what I’m referring to here is a bit more involved. With any project you need a process. Web development/design has its own nuances. You should have an appointed internal contact that is dedicated to the project and will work closely with your vendor, if you outsource.There are many processes you can follow such as (Pre-production, Production, Maintenance, Evaluation) or (Define, Design, Develop, Launch). At SystemTrends, we’ve munged three different project management processes into our own flavor. The key isn’t “what” process you use but to have a process and use it.
4.	Consider Cost of Ownership – As you think through what you want to accomplish with a redesign, you will undoubtedly identify many cool features you can add to your site. But as you do, remember that with each new feature you will have to maintain it. The most common example I run across is a blog. Many customers ask me about adding a blog to their site. My first question is, who’s going to maintain it? Same thing with news, announcements, a library or pretty much any new content area. One of the reasons people have gravitated toward news feeds, and user-generated content is that it keeps their site’s content fresh with minimal effort. But content isn’t the only area where you need to consider cost of ownership. New applications can potentially require updates and developer maintenance and that new banner advertising will eventually get old and need replacing. If you don’t have internal graphic resources, you need to plan to spend a little money here and there to keep the eye candy fresh.
5.	Remember The Developers – When people think of a site revamp, they often forget the technical aspects that will make the cool new design a reality. I was once brought in on a project late because the designer, who was primarily a print designer, wasn’t able to take his vision to the web. We had to rework a lot of items and do most of the site with JavaScript roll-overs. Had we been brought in early on, we could have taken a different approach and saved us all tremendous headache.
6.	Analyze Your Competition – Visit your competitor sites, honestly and objectively, to see what is working for them. You might discover more effective ways to lead potential customers through your sales funnel. Competitors may be using a particular service that you can add. You might even notice something that you need to avoid with your redesign.
7.	Design With SEM In Mind – If you’ve not done so already, plan to incorporate Search Engine Marketing into your next revamp. As competition stiffens, SEM will become more of a standard and if you neglect this area, it could impact traffic and your ultimate bottom line.
8.	Design For Users – The old marketing axiom “know your audience” rings true in Web design as well. If your users find it difficult to navigate your site, or if you have organizational pressures forcing you to make certain decisions about advertising placement or content that cause confusion to your customer, you may lose potential sales.Another common mistake is to structure a site to mirror the internal organizational structure. Think about what a user needs to know who is not familiar with your company. Then lead them through the clicks or pages you want them to see and read.
9.	Manage Expectations – If you are part of a company any larger than 1, you need to manage expectations. I’ve seen projects get totally derailed because of lack of communication between vendors, project teams and stakeholders. If a project is longer than 6 weeks, I try to have weekly status calls with clients to review issues, iron out scope changes and generally manage expectations. Your project management process will work wonders here if you let it. When you set clear goals, you can always point to them and explain that these are the agreed upon objectives and anything beyond them will require scheduling and resource changes. With any Web project, you will always have more that you want to do than what you can do in the allotted time or budget. Consider a phased approach to introduce important features. It’s a great way to stay on task and still account for needed future additions.
10.	Allow for On-going Evaluation – Once you launch, your job, in many ways, is just beginning. If you’ve done your planning and execution well, you’ll be in a mode to monitor what is working on the site and be able to make quick tweaks to adjust as things pop up. You’ll also want to conduct post launch analysis of Web logs to see what pages get the most traffic, where customers are bailing on your site, etc. That will help you make informed decisions about what needs changing.

I’m sure you can think of many more but these are ten of the most common tips I keep in mind as I work with clients.