How to Re-Design Your Website – Three Considerations

How to Re-Design Your Website – Three Considerations

As a youth, I was friendly with the son of a prominent architect. It was high school and this friend started dating a girl that I knew from grade school. She lived in a big house. A really, really big house. With a tennis court. A court that had a state of the art ball feeder parked right next to it.

I loved that house. I played on the tennis team in those years, so having unfettered access to an empty court with a ball machine was as good as it got.

Anyway, on one summer day I found myself alone in the big house with my friend’s dad, the architect. In an effort to make small talk, I probably said something like, “Isn’t this a great house?” and he said something that sticks with me to this day.

“Greg,” he said, “this thing was built for show, not for go.”

Then he preceded to give me a quick education on the elements of a home that are for “show” and where a home should be built for “go”. Message delivered, message received.

So it goes with website redesign.

You can build for show, but make sure your site has the go.

Here are 3 considerations when re-designing your website:

1. Know what success looks like before you begin. 

This usually requires someone taking the time to figure out where you are today, but once you have that established, figure out where you want to go. Your company website is something that you see 100 times more often than the people you’re building it for. That can lead to thoughts like “I’m sick of looking at this thing”. Get away from the solution (new site design) and get back into the data. What is the site doing and what do you want it to do? A re-design should move you toward that goal.

As an aside, it’s perfectly valid to end up with a statement like, “I just want to see something different and as long as the results are similar to today, I’m happy.” Just know it up front so a year from now you’re not saying “We paid $8K for a new site and it’s not doing anything!”

2. User experience should drive the project.

There’s a lot that can be gained from talking to the people that the site is trying to help. Direct contact. Whether it’s a consumer site, a B2B site or a an intranet re-design, keep those customers at the front of the process. Surveys, sitting users in front of mock ups, full blown market research. . . it’s worth every penny. The clearer your ideas are, the better the re-design will be.

Yes, it adds time and expense, but that’s why you start with knowing what success looks like, right?

3. Look under the hood twice as many times as you look at the paint job.

I know, I’m mixing analogies but I wasn’t listening to my buddy’s dad closely enough to retain any architectural knowledge. So I’m switching to a car. Don’t be fooled by the paint job. Make sure it runs. There’s a myriad of checklists out on Dr. Google, pick a few and sound intelligent when you quiz the contractors. If you’ve done a good job defining the objective, they should be on the same page  with you and worry twice as much about how it works as they do with how it looks. You want them to be constantly asking themselves, “Is this going to move them closer to their goal?”

Relentlessly efficient process. Like a wolf. Only do what needs to be done to meet  your needs.

If you need help with this, send me a note and I’ll coach you through it.

Good stuff.