How To Redesign A Website Effectively With A Vetted Project Plan
If you have to redesign a website, it’s better to do so in a structured manner. Using a vetted project plan for the redesign is an essential best practice that allows your development team to overcome the hurdles of modernizing the target layout faster. This promotes a more efficient workflow, a structured development strategy, and — ultimately — a better site for the business.
The implication here is that redesigning a website isn’t necessarily a straightforward process, especially considering the fact that most websites require continuous, 24/7 operation. What are the key components of a good plan? How can you systematically achieve a better design? And, most importantly, how do you streamline the entire process?
In this article, we’re going to answer all of these questions by describing a highly effective project plan used by development studios like DarwinApps in order to achieve high-quality results faster and more efficiently than your competition. We’ve developed our own specialized strategy over the years, and we’d love to share in-depth details on how to tackle your website redesign.
Ready? Let’s jump right in.
How To Structure a Website Redesign Project Plan
Taking an existing website design and re-shaping it into something that’s more appropriate and more in tune with the site owner’s current goal is not as easy as you might think. The main issue with websites one year or older is that users are accustomed to an interface that hasn’t changed for a long time, and they generally will assume that the experience will be similar when going back to them.
This is a key factor to take into consideration when redesigning a website, and it paves the way for a structured development strategy. On top of this, understanding how to structure your website redesign project plan requires various steps, including but not limited to:
- Discovering the scope of the redesign process and taking note of existing features
- Analyzing the existing website and defining goals based on new requirements
- Illustrating page flow with a flowchart that clearly shows user interaction with the site
- Analyzing the current user experience to highlight pitfalls and bottlenecks
- Deciding which new features are required in order to meet the defined goals
- Reviewing the content and evaluating whether it should be transferred or not
- Laying the foundation for a new, more effective sitemap that is easier to navigate
A good foundation will likely improve the end result by a large margin, and the way this foundation is built requires collaboration between the site owner and the development studio. Understanding what’s required at a high level sets the stage for a quality outcome.
In addition, structuring a website redesign project plan requires a lot of technical prowess since many of the tools used in the process are fundamentally complex, processing huge amounts of data regarding hundreds if not thousands of web pages and highlighting the current sitemap.
The Creative Side of Redesigning a Website from Scratch
All websites tell a story and — from a design perspective — the narrative is clear. A good user interface (UI) needs to address both the technical and a creative “vision”, but what if that vision proves clunky? You don’t want to lose out on users who pay attention to good design!
A professional development studio like DarwinApps should first and foremost analyze the existing website from the user’s point of view, separating technical requirements from the user experience (UX). If the UX proves itself strong at bringing users from point A to point B, it could be “recycled” to ease the users into a new, more modern layout without breaking the experience.
This is only possible if the UX doesn’t rely too heavily on existing design properties or branding. If it does, then starting from scratch might be a better option. The ideal solution would be preserving as much of the original experience as possible without fundamentally breaking the new layout in the process.
This means that both technical and design requirements need to be addressed simultaneously, deciding whether or not a specific technology would benefit the tweaked UX. In fact, redesigning an existing website involves stricter requirements than developing a new website.
In a perfect world, designers and developers would find a seamless solution that tweaks the older UX and integrates it with a completely new layout, allowing professionals to take full creative ownership of the project. In the real world, it’s much harder to achieve a new design that doesn’t fundamentally break the UX. So, at times, redesigning the layout and the UX is the best solution.
The Technical Side of Redesigning a Website from Scratch
Since the creative and the technical sides of the process are so intertwined, working on a new layout can be intimidating. However, there are techniques designed to mitigate potential issues during the design stage, making for an ideal, structured project plan.
These are the techniques required to achieve an optimal outcome:
- Holding 1-on-1 Interviews with Decision Makers — These are key to start on the right foot as they clear out any potential doubts the team might have during the discovery phase
- Creating Project Briefs — These are documents that include everything the project should tackle by listing relevant questions and providing ideal, realistic scenarios
- Analyzing the Competition — A crucial part of any website redesign project plan is the competitive analysis that allows the team to design the site based on the site owner’s competition, trying to strike the right balance between marketing and business goals
- Evaluating the Content — Making the final choice on content before the design process even begins is crucial to establishing the new layout and tweaking the user experience
- Analyzing Flowcharts and Sitemaps — Two elements which allow the team to visualize the project instead of relying on text-only documents which can’t depict an accurate image
- Finding Inspiration — A key component of redesigning a website is finding inspiration by looking at existing designs, modernizing bits and pieces from the original layout
- Using Wireframes — Getting approval on key design ideas is quintessential to achieving quality interfaces which are unanimously accepted by designers and developers
- Creating Mockups — In the later design stages, creating mockups is a perfect way to highlight the overall look-and-feel of the website, visualizing potential improvements
These eight techniques form the backbone of a good website redesign project plan, and they precede the actual coding of the website. However, starting from the last point onwards, you can sometimes expect back-and-forth communication between design and development teams — especially when it comes to making sure that all checkmarks described in the project briefs are being addressed.
Making the Best Out of Your Website Redesign Project Plan
We’ve answered some of the questions regarding how to build a project plan that doesn’t stray away from the site owner’s requirements. Now, we can take these concepts and translate them into actionable steps, essentially making the best out of your website redesign project plan.
Once both the design and the development team come up with a solution, it’s best to streamline the process as much as possible. This means fully focusing on the redesign first, going into full development mode only once the prototyping and mockups have shown a clear design direction (and ideally only once the designs are finalized in a pixel-perfect manner).
With all the proper tools in hand and by following the best practices, your team can achieve a redesign that’s both significantly better and more relevant than the original from an aesthetic, a technological, and a user experience standpoint. Sacrificing any of these could stifle site (and business!) growth.
We at DarwinApps focus on redesigning websites in a way that minimizes resistance from legacy users and maximizes potential returns. Determining a design which captivates modern, internet-savvy users while retaining the site’s legacy user base is at the core of what we do. You can learn more about our website redesign services here.
Making the best out of your website redesign also means putting in place the building blocks for easier future innovations and functionality implementations.
If you have any further insight, or if you’d like to participate in the conversation, leave a comment down below!
