Today your potential customers are spending most of their buyer’s journey time on the web and talking with others long before they even think about contacting you and your organization. That makes a hardworking, high-performance website a critical investment for professional services and small and midsized businesses (SMBs). Whether you’re planning to work with a designer, an agency or redesigning inhouse, you cannot afford to underestimate the process and blend of skills and talent needed for a successful website redesign.
The website redesign process
Planning for a website up front can save time, money, and a boatload of frustration, so don’t jump in and hire a designer just yet. Transforming your site from what is often a basic digital brochure into an interactive, lead-generating marketing tool is a complex process. To help you thoroughly plan and track the progress of your website redesign, think in terms of the seven essential stages HubSpot describes for the process. (While stages 1 and 2 primarily involve benchmarking, taking inventory, and answering important questions before you begin your website redesign, the latter stages are for tracking your redesign while it’s in progress.)
Stage 1 – Strategy
A) Benchmark Your Current Metrics.
Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
Bounce rate (monthly average)
Time on site (monthly average)
Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic and lead generation)
Number of inbound linking domains
Total number of new leads/form submissions (per month)
Total amount of sales generated (per month)
Total number of total pages indexed
Total number of pages that receive traffic
B) Determine Your Goal(s).
Why are you doing the redesign?
C) Define Your Brand.
What is your business’s message/unique value proposition?
Is it (message and/or branding) changing or staying the same?
If it is changing, what about it needs to change?
D) Define Your Buyer Persona.
Do you currently have a clearly defined target audience?
Is this audience changing as part of this redesign?
Does your branding and content currently align with that audience?
E) Analyze the Competition
Are there competitor sites that you really like? If so, which ones?
What are the top 3 most competitive keywords for your industry?
Who are your top-ranked competitors?
Stage 2 – Plan
A) Questions to Consider
What do I currently like and dislike about my website?
What is missing from the current website?
How does my current site compare to your goals?
What’s the first impression I want to give my target audience?
Does my site currently convey a feeling of trustworthyness and authority?
Will this be a whole new website or are there small changes that can be made?
Will the domain name change at all?
What platform do I want my new website to be on?
What is a realistic timeline for this redesign? (Define a target date.)
What is our budget for this project?
Can we do this work in-house or do we need to hire someone?
B) Platform Considerations
What platform(s) are you evaluating?
Does the platform have a good reputation? (Look at ratings and reviews.)
Does the platform have good deliverability (e.g. site speed & uptime)?
Is the platform SEO-friendly (e.g. well-structured URLs)?
C) Taking Inventory of Your Existing Assets
What is your most shared or viewed content?
What are your most trafficked pages?
What are your most ranked pages?
Do you have any duplicate content? (If so, make a note of it here.)
D) Site Architecture
Plan the new site architecture/structure.
Define which pages will be part of your main/secondary navigation.
Put together a draft outline/sitemap of the new website to be designed and built.
E) Hosting, Security, & CDNs
Determine if you need hosting services.
Determine if you need a separate CDN.
F) Planning Out Your URL Mapping / 301 Redirects
Which of the following will apply to your website redesign?
The site structure is changing (which means the URLs will probably change too).
Site structure is not changing, but you want to update URLs for SEO/user-friendliness.
Some site pages will be merged.
Action item:
Map out your URLs/redirects in a spreadsheet.
G) Define Your Content Plan
Outline which content stays.
Outline which content goes.
Outline which content needs to be rewritten.
Identify what new calls-to-action need to be added.
“I urge you to at least start working out a plan before talking to a designer.”
Stage 3 – Design
Stage 4 – Build
Stage 5 – Optimize
Stage 6 – Launch
Stage 7 – Analyze
Common team member roles for the website design-build stages
Content manager: The content manager brings the customer focus. How do your prospects and customers expect to get their information? What do they need? What are they searching for? The content manger uses outward facing language to develop meaningful content with key terms (keywords) and will optimize the content for the target audience and search engines.
Designer: The designer is responsible to create graphics that are both visually appealing and resonate with the target audience. The designer will also maintain brand standards including colors, typefaces, and logo placement.
Web developer, coder or page creator: The developer is charged with implementing the design and using good web standards. Not only does the page or site need to maintain the visual appeal of the design while delivering the content, it needs to do so efficiently and with tracking and metrics. The developer is responsible to be sure analytics are functioning to track not only page views, but traffic flows and responses.
The advantages of using a team to create and manage your website
An integrated team blends together the strengths and talents of each member. Together, team members can build on each others’ efforts and collaborate to create a final product that is stronger and potentially more effective than any one member could create alone.
You can probably tell when you see a website that was written and designed by the one person – either the writing is weak or the design is lacking. That’s because content and design are different skill sets (and that’s not to mention coding or SEO skills!) A good writer or content manger finds the words to describe your company in a way that resonates with your target audience. A designer does the same for your layout, choosing styles that represent your company and invite your audience to spend their time looking at your website.
Next stages
In future posts I’ll delve into more detail about the other often-overlooked stages of the website redesign process —Optimize, Launch and Analyze. Subscribe by email so you don’t miss a thing.
