Redesigning your website is no easy feat. It’s a delicate process, balancing tight timelines and budgets on the one hand with demanding (and often conflicting) stakeholder visions and objectives on the other.
To (hopefully) make your redesign go a little bit smoother, here are our top tips when you’re in the planning stage:
- Get lots of stakeholder input
- Establish a shared vision
- Plan which metrics are going to be tracked
- Establish a baseline – metrics and testing
- Assign responsibility
Let’s look at those in a little more detail.
1. Get lots of stakeholder input
Depending on your organization, this might be grueling or it might be wonderful. You want to get input from every level of your organization that’s going to interact with the final website.
This will include the C-suite (or your organization’s equivalent) – you need to know what the people at the tippy top want. But you also need to talk to people much lower down – the team who’s going to maintain the site, the marketing team who’s updating and uploading content, the social media manager who’s posting and updating all the channels, driving people to the site.
More specific teams might be the sales team, if you’re redesigning a lead generation site, or the customer support team if you’re an e-commerce site. By talking to lots of people, you’ll get a better idea of the existing pain points within the current site, where they think there’s room for improvement, and what they want from the new site.
This will obviously be different depending on who you ask, but over time you can probably pull together some common threads.
2. Establish a shared vision
Following gathering stakeholder input, you want to establish a shared vision. This is as much a definition as what the final product will be as it is what it won’t. By clearly articulating what the new website will or won’t do, you ensure that the rest of the project runs much smoother.
What’s more, a clear shared vision gives everyone something to come back to down the road. Plus, it forms a solid basis for project scope down the line, and makes it easy to define what’s inside the project, and what isn’t.
3. Plan which metrics are going to be tracked
Figure out what success will actually look like, and when you’re going to measure. For example, are you going to measure just purchases? Or are you going to measure abandonment as well?Are you going to measure raw visitors or are you going to measure the percentage change over last year?
There are literally hundreds of metrics you can track – pick a few (generously, say 10) that are going to signify your success or failure in the redesign. Second, pick when you’re going to measure them. After one month? After six? We recommend at least six months of tracking, preferably with a year-over-year comparison before jumping to any conclusions.
Why?
Because a redesign can have a lot of short-term impact (good and bad) that will fade, but might mess up your metrics in the meantime.
4. Establish a baseline – metrics and testing
Following hard on the heels of picking which metrics to track is establishing a baseline. As we said, we recommend a year-over-year comparison – how well were these metrics doing in August last year, compared to August this year, post-redesign? Easy.
Another really good way to get a handle on how well your site is doing pre-redesign, in order to get a good idea of how it does post, is to do some user testing. Talk to users about what they like and don’t like. Better yet, fold this into your stakeholder input, so you know what the user wants as well.
Then, after six months of the new site, you can go back and ask users about those same pain points. Did you solve them? Did you create new ones? Can you improve more? User input after the redesign and before gives you lots of comparison data to evaluate the project.
5. Assign responsibility
Don’t assume that it will happen naturally, and the more granular, the better. Make sure everyone has clear idea of what they have to do, and when they have to do it by. It’ll help you keep everything that’s going on straight, and it’ll be really obvious when someone doesn’t deliver.
This might sound terrible, but it means that you can pinpoint problems early on and solve them with minimal delay to the overall project. It’ll help you stay on top of things, so the project doesn’t go (too) over time or budget.
Conclusion
A redesign isn’t the most fun project on the planet. But it doesn’t have to be a long, gruelling process akin to pulling teeth out of an elephant. By clearly establishing what you’re doing, how you’re measuring it, what success will look like, and who’s going to actually
do the work, you can save yourself a lot of worry lines.
Got any of your own planning stage tips? Let us know in the comments! 