5 Must-Ask Questions to Answer Before Redesigning Your Website
On the surface, redesigning your organization’s website can seem so simple: just throw a fresh coat of paint on it and you’re done! In reality, redesign projects can be a formidable endeavor. There are usually multiple stakeholders to satisfy, and no shortage of opinions on what is important and what will constitute success. Compounding things, internal pressures often lead to starting the work before your goals are well defined.
Creating a successful website requires more than just engaging visuals and reliable functionality (if you’ve chosen the right design partner, those should be a given). For a redesign project to be truly successful, you’ll need a solid understanding of why you’re doing a website redesign in the first place.
We, at Teal Media, have put together a list of 5 critical questions you should ask yourself before beginning a website redesign. If you put in the necessary time and effort to answer these questions now, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition in the end.
#1: Who are you?
Before you start defining specific objectives for the redesign, it is important to take a step back and come to a shared understanding of who you are as an organization. What are your organizational values? What do you do best (perhaps better than anyone else)? What makes you unique? How do you hope to evolve as an organization in the next year? If you can’t clearly state these things, there’s no way your audience will be able to. Worse yet, you’ll end up with a website that tries to be everything to all people — which isn’t effective for anybody.
When you have consensus about the identity of your organization, you’ll not only be able to take a more disciplined and focused approach to your website redesign, you’ll be able to create a site that feels uniquely you — in everything from the words on the page, to the images and graphics, to how things function. In other words, the site will be authentic to who you are as an organization. And authenticity fosters connection. When you’re able to connect with your audiences, they’ll be more likely to stay on your site, explore your content, and ultimately take action.
#2. Why do we need to redesign our website?
It sounds like a silly question, but why ARE you redesigning your website? While it’s perfectly valid to revamp your site if it’s starting to look like a relic, you’ll maximize your return on investment when you’ve set specific objectives.
At Teal Media, we strongly recommend that you have no more than 3 main business goals for your website redesign, and that you prioritize and agree to them. That way, when you have to make tough decisions down the road about how you should organize the site and what should be more prominent on the homepage, you can refer to those prioritized goals to assist you with your decision-making.
We also recommend that you write your goals to be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based), and clearly specify why you are working toward that goal.
Here’s a good example:
We want to increase email sign-ups by 10% by 6 months after launch so that we can grow our list of supporters to increase the potential for donations.
Whatever your goals may be, you’ll want to benchmark your current performance on those goals with a tool like Google Analytics.
Knowing things like the number of unique visitors, how much time they’re spending on your site, how many actions they’ve taken, and so on, will provide a baseline for quantifying future improvement. A deep dive into your analytics may also reveal tensions between internal stakeholder perceptions of the current site vs. reality. You may notice specific content that is driving a surprising percentage of your overall traffic. Or, that more of your users are arriving via social media links than anticipated. This type of data will help shape your redesign strategy, along with influencing post-launch marketing efforts.
#3. Who are your users? (and, what do THEY WANT to do vs. what do YOU WANT them to do?)
User-centered design is no longer an afterthought: it’s the standard. You can have the most beautiful, perfectly functioning website, but if it doesn’t meet the needs of your users, you will have missed the mark.
Long before design and development begin, you’ll be working with your user experience (UX) partner to clearly define your key audiences and understand their reasons for going to your site and what they hope to achieve once they’ve arrived. Your UX team will conduct user interviews and other research to gather this critical data but it’s helpful if you can get a jumpstart on this important work.
Think about questions like:
- Who are your primary audiences?
- Why are they coming to our website?
- What are the top tasks they hope to accomplish?
- What do they struggle with on your current site?
- What content, features, and/or functionality would help them achieve their tasks?
When you define who your users are and what they hope to accomplish and compare that against your organizational business goals (see #2 above!), you can refine and tailor content in ways that will supercharge your website’s effectiveness. You’ll also be a valuable partner to your design team throughout the process.
#4. What is your competition doing?
To distinguish your organization’s site from others in the space, you’ll want to know how your site stacks up in terms of messaging, structure, visual design, and functionality.
Your design team should perform a competitive landscape analysis, but it can be helpful to do some of this homework on your own. By conducting a thorough review of your competition, you can identify particular audience needs that aren’t being served and revise your content strategy accordingly. You may discover certain types of functionality that are “standard” in your space that you’d like to include in your new site. Or, you might find that chief competitors are serving up frustrating site experiences, creating an opportunity for your new site to really stand out.
#5. What internal resources do we have to support the new website?
With all this focus on what to do before a redesign, it’s easy to forget about all the work that comes during the redesign process and after the new site is live. Here’s a short list of things to plan for:
- Decision-making. It is critical that you clearly define who your decision-makers will be and your decision-making process prior to your project kick-off. This will determine how quickly you can move through the website design and development process. As a general rule of thumb, the more decision-makers you have, the longer and more complicated your website redesign process will be. On average, how many days will you need on your side to review deliverables and provide and consolidate feedback? This will be extremely helpful for your web partner to know up front and it will help set expectations with your internal and external teams.
- Content. Your content is the reason why people are coming to your website. If the redesign dictates that you have to create new or edit existing content, do you have the internal resources ready to do so? Do you have the internal resources that can get trained in the website content management system to populate all of the content so it’s loaded and ready for launch? Once your site is live, do you have a plan in place for creating and managing new content over time (both copy and visual content) to keep your site fresh? If you need help on the content front, you’ll definitely need to set aside some money in your budget for content writing, editing, and/or coaching.
- Technical updates. To keep your website operating smoothly and up-to-date on the latest security releases, you’ll need to have a plan in place for ongoing technical maintenance. Do you have those skills in house, or will you need to ask your partner for help in this? If the latter, you’ll want to plan for this in your website redesign budget.
- Digital marketing. Your new website should work strategically and seamlessly with your other online marketing efforts like social media and email, rather than being siloed. Be sure to consider the resources required to create promotional materials such as social graphics and email blasts.
- Metrics. Finally, don’t forget to devise a plan for measuring your success. Resources will be needed to evaluate your new website’s performance against your business goals on an ongoing basis. Be prepared to make tweaks along the way to refine and sharpen your strategy, in the spirit of continuous improvement.
Other things to keep in mind
Once you’ve taken all of the above into consideration, there’s still more to do. Here’s a bit more food for thought as you plan for your website redesign:
- Do you know the project budget? Be realistic about how much you have available vs. how much you might need.
- What are your criteria for finding the right design and development partner?
- Have you conducted a content audit? What content on your current site will be staying, and what goes? Now’s the time to clean house.
- Do you have existing brand guidelines? How closely does the redesigned site need to adhere to them? What about other design assets? A common mistake is for an organization to assume that a brand “refresh” can be shoehorned into a website redesign, when they are in fact totally separate undertakings.
Taking on a website redesign can seem like a daunting task. However, spending time up-front to think through strategic issues and broader goals will help pave the way to success.
If you plan properly for a website redesign, you won’t waste precious hours on process and information gathering — that extra time (and money!) can be used towards the design and development of your new site.
A little preparedness will provide you with more bang-for-your-buck and a solid framework for your successful redesign!
Teal Media is a full-service creative agency with a conscience. We pour every ounce of our passion and skill toward your success, because we, too, want the world to be a better place. We believe purposeful design can transform organizations, inspire action, and enable progress. We’d love to help you with your website redesign. Give us a shout!
Learn more at TealMedia.com and find us on Facebook and Twitter.
