Manage Your Website Redesign Intelligently

08.28.12

By Andrew Wetzler, President

By now, most company's websites have been through a handful of redesigns. Sometimes the process and results are favorable and oftentimes they aren't. The next time you undertake a redesign, keep a few points in mind to ensure that the end result meets your objectives.

Do you recall the old adage, "when you ASSUME, you make an Ass out of You and Me"? The more ambiguous you are in your stated redesign requirements, the less likely you are to wind up with a new website that cost effectively accomplishes your intentions.

This ties into a related conundrum when seeking quotes for a redesign project...Sometimes proposals are very vague and other times they are rich in detail. When a proposal is vague, the client needs to make a lot of ASSUMPTIONS about how the finished product is going to look, function and (hopefully) be found in the search engines.  Those leaps of faith typically do not materialize favorably, while remaining within the agreed upon budget for the project.

There are a number of areas that you want to be as clear about as possible. These include:

• Size of site
• Who will be responsible for writing and optimizing content?
• Are there any external programs the site needs to be integrated with?
• # of mockups that you want to see before finalizing the look and feel
• E-Commerce functionality (nuances related to your business)
• Google Analytics coding
• Who will be responsible for managing your site after launch?

It's also helpful to differentiate between absolute must-have components of a new website from wish list items. For example, building in a custom video player will be more costly than embedding YouTube videos.

Thoughtful redesign efforts will always have the best outcomes. Spend time figuring out what your sites needs to embody, then make sure you receive proposals that not only reflect those prerequisites, but go overboard in detailing how the project will be accomplished. The relative clarity in proposals is best understood if you seek more than one when engaging a design firm.

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