A design for life? What to consider before a website redesign
Redesigning a website is one of the most high-profile marketing projects a business will embark on. The investment, in time and cash terms, is significant and there is much at stake.
Before you start, think about what you’re hoping to achieve. Is your current website old and no longer represents your brand? Do you have a website that works well on desktop but looks nasty when viewed on mobile devices? Are you planning to up the ante when it comes to blogging? Do the images and visual look leave you cold? Are you spending money on pay-per-click but not seeing a return on your investment? Perhaps it’s all of these things.
Either way, there are some key factors that you need to consider before you make a start on that all-important brief:
Budget
Marketing experts are often accused of being – how can we put this – ‘insensitive’ to budget constraints. We’re firmly in the opposite camp. Taking an early, and realistic, look at your budget is essential as the resource available will frame the project and avoid wasting time talking to suppliers who may be able to deliver what you want, but not for what you have to spend. Being clear on budget from the outset will help you identify the right partners (i.e. it can be more cost-effective to employ the services of a separate designer and developer instead of a web agency) and define the scope of the project. With a limited budget, and where the site is likely to need to change very quickly as the company changes, an agile approach may be the right choice.
Who will you partner with?
An important decision is weighing up whether to use an agency to deliver the project, or work with separate designers and developers. In our experience, the latter is often a smart choice for many organisations as using separate experts tends to mean greater flexibility, collaboration and a better end-result. That said, there are exceptions of course and there are a number of excellent web agencies in Brighton who have really cracked collaborative working.
As well as deciding who your design and development partners are, being clear about who is going to manage the project itself is vital. More on that later….
Content and timescales
As marketers who have undertaken more website projects than most people have had hot dinners we have seen time and time again situations where content has been the issue that has thrown a spanner in the works, or severely delayed, the launch of a new website. By content we mean anything that is contained on the site – copy, images, videos, team profiles, downloadable files and resources. A website redesign project usually means an overhaul of all of these things, and so the volume of work is significant. You will need to factor content into your timescales – even if you could get a new site designed and built in the space of a month, would you and your teams be able to generate all the fresh content required for the site in that time?
As well as impacting the project timeline, making early decisions about the content is essential as it will determine what sort of site you are looking to achieve. Think about what content formats the new site needs to host. Words, images for sure, probably a blog, but what about other media? According to research by Cisco, by 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. So, for example, if video content is going to be a central element of your new site, this will impact not only the design but also the technical development to ensure video plays seamlessly across all devices.
Project management
We can’t underestimate the importance of strong project management when it comes to redesigning a website, which is a complex journey for a number of reasons. A robust, well-thought through brief is required. Your chosen partners (whether an agency or freelancers) will require managing. There are often multiple stakeholders and always a significant number of milestones and mini-deadlines to hit on the road to launch.
Many organisations choose to run the project themselves, which can work but is rarely easy. With your your own workload, client needs and a team and business to run, managing a project of this scale is at best unlikely to be the most effective use of your time. At worse, it may mean a slow, drawn-out project which eats time and resource. So, think about how you can focus your time and energy in the right places (for example, on getting expert content and materials for the new site just right) and delegate the project management to another partner with experience of running projects of this kind.
Look out for our next blog on the subject of website redesign where we’ll take a closer look at some of the issues you’ll need to consider when it comes to putting together a project brief.
If you have a website redesign project in mind, or would like to talk to us about how we can help you take a project forward (including the all-important project management aspect), do get in touch.