Preparing for a Website Redesign

WHITEPAPER / WWW.PINT.COM

Before you reach out

Deciding on a vendor

Budgets

Timelines

Getting aligned internally

Identifying your target market

Collecting design assets

Benchmarking site usage and performance

GETTING ORGANIZED

ESTABLISHING PROJECT EXPECTATIONS

FINDING THE RIGHT PARTNER

Is a Website Redesign the Right Choice?This question is significant and should not be overlooked. In fact, we have written an article about the pros and cons of both a website redesign and continuous improvement.

However, this white paper specifically addresses individuals who have already determined that completing a website redesign is the best path for his or her organization.

Website redesign projects can be daunting. We’ve put together some simple guidelines to help you get organized and feel prepared for the undertaking.

Overview

We’ve also included our Project Needs Questionnaire — a tool to get you thinking in more detail about the different aspects of a website redesign, and what your needs might be.

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Whether you are at a small or large company, there are likely representatives from multiple departments within your company that you’ll want to speak with before speaking with vendors.

If you are reading this whitepaper, then we assume you might be in the marketing, corporate communications, or investor relations department.

These departments will likely coordinate the entire project, and will be involved throughout the project lifecycle.

For departments outside of these areas, we’ve mapped out the best time to include them in the process below.

Getting Aligned Internally

The information in this whitepaper should help clarify your website needs, so that you can reach out to vendors with a clear strategy in mind. Being organized from the beginning can significantly speed up the timeline, reduce costs, and improve the end result of your project.

Reviewing these considerations carefully before engaging with a vendor should help you get accurate estimates of hours, budget, and timeline.

If you find you can't answer all the questions outlined in the Project Needs Questionnaire, most agencies are equipped to help you find answers by conducting a discovery or research phase before your project begins.

Engaging with an unbiased party to work through ideas and decisions may help alleviate internal political hurdles, help prevent filibustering new innovative ideas, and mediate discussions to focus around data and best practices.

Getting Organized

IT is another group that should be spoken with before speaking with agencies. Depending on the expected role of the IT organization at your company, they may have a strong say in the website redesign project or they may not. It is important to have that conversation early and determine which camp you fall into.

IT may want to weigh in on things like hosting environment for the new website, preferred development stack to maintain the website after launch, potential

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

integration points between the website and other systems of record, as well as any other technical requirements.

For example, if IT has a hard requirement that the website is hosted on the Acquia cloud and developed in Drupal, then it will be important to narrow your agency selection down to firms that are proficient in those technologies. Finance and IT are the two key departments that we recommend speaking to before engaging with a vendor.

Other departments within your organization will certainly be helpful to talk to during the functional and technical discovery portion of the project, but it is typically best to include those departments once the agency has been selected and the project is underway. Concrete examples of departments that you may want to include in the website discovery process include human resources and sales.

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FINANCE

Finance (whether that is the finance department at your company or the department head of a group like corporate communications who has budget authority) should be asked about a project budget before talking with vendors. Knowing any budget constraints early will help you narrow the field of companies you reach out to for proposals and save you time.

A small budget will usually be more conducive to working with an independent contractor whereas a larger budget usually lends itself to working with an agency or multiple agencies to execute the project.

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SALES & CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Sales and customer support are key departments to bring into the project for a unique perspective after you have engaged a web vendor. Your sales and customer support teams can likely help you surface who your current customer base is, what problem your company solves for them, their satisfaction with your company or product, why they chose you over a competitor, etc.

Additionally, they may have good information from recent conversations with customers who have been recently onboarded at your company and potentially with insights from prospective customers that chose to go with one of your competitors.

Sales will likely be able to speak to how well the current website reflects the value your company

can provide to customers in its target market. They will also likely have a list of your closest competitors which will also be helpful if you deem it important to conduct a competitive analysis of the market during the research phase of the web project.

Human resource departments at many companies use third party systems such as Talemetry, Workable, JazzHR, or a plethora of others. Find out which HR system your HR department is using and if that company has any requirements or constraints around redesigning the front end experience of the careers section of your website.

If your HR department is not currently using a third party system to manage recruiting, this website redesign process may represent a good opportunity to vet third party vendors and implement a new system at the time the website launches.

HUMAN RESOURCES

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To have a successful website redesign project, it’s important to know who your website will serve and what it should do for them. This information is typically researched and determined during the discovery phase of the website redesign project.

Before the project kicks off, start thinking about and identifying which of your users (or potential users) may be a good resource for the discovery process.

Answer these questions:

Which end-user segments do I have?

Are they willing to help with the discovery?

Which current or potential users represent that segment well?

Getting a few users and potential users on board to help with discovery before the project starts can provide great insight into the thought processes of your customers, allowing creative personnel at an agency to solve problems or craft messaging based on real user needs. This up front planning can speed up the discovery process and save you precious project time.

Identifying Your Target Market

If your branding assets and guidelines are changing during the website redesign project, consider whether there are print materials and media such as business cards, brochures, presentation templates, etc. that will need to be updated to match.

If you don’t have branding assets to share, or you are interested in making changes to your brand identity, be sure to point this out to the vendors you’re assessing so they know to include this type of design work as part of the project proposal.

Logo

Fonts

Color palette

Messaging guidelines

Branding guidelines

Imagery/photography

Branded files (templates, business cards, etc.)

Before engaging with a vendor, take stock of your current branding assets. Do you have a logo, color palette, fonts, etc. that communicates your company’s message? If so, be sure to gather them.

Common branding assets include:

Collecting Design Assets

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By reviewing your analytics and site performance data, you can help determine some of the constraints for your web project, including which browsers and devices to optimize for, the use of CDNs to improve performance, important pages to prioritize, and more.

In addition to helping provide requirements for the website redesign project, it is important to benchmark site performance statistics to understand how the newly redesigned website compares to the previous site.

Below we’ve outlined some of the top metrics to check and how they can impact your decisions. These metrics can be found in Google Analytics, but should be available in most site analytics tools.

Benchmarking Site Usage and Performance

SITE OVERVIEW

SESSIONS: Know your average number of sessions per month or quarter. This can help determine hosting needs and the impact of site changes (how many people will have to readjust to your new design?).

TRAFFIC SOURCES: Determine where your sessions are coming from including channels and referrals. If your website gets a significant portion of traffic from organic search or a certain referral source, it’s important to note that in order to ensure that search engine optimization is executed properly and the referral source is updated with the latest URLs (especially if there is a new site structure!).

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BROWSER & OS: Check the technology report for your top browsers and operating systems. Typically, any browser (and OS combo) over 2% or over 500 users in the last six months should be error free and match the design composite as closely as possible.

If an older version of Edge is still in one of your top spots, spending the extra time to make it look and function appropriately might be worth it. It is important to note that special attention may need to be paid to certain browsers and operating systems for other reasons, such as the typical browser and OS of internal stakeholders, emerging target markets, etc.

DEVICE: View the device report to see the breakdown of mobile, tablet, and desktop traffic. Once you have this information, it can help you prioritize which device type is most important to spend time and money perfecting. Keep in mind though, that simply because you have a small percentage of mobile traffic, that does not mean you can ignore mobile.

AVG. SESSION DURATION: This metric will show how long users spend on the site. Rather than directly informing the website redesign, this is a good benchmark for comparing the website before and after a redesign.

BOUNCE RATE: Find your site bounce rate, especially on high-impact pages, whether those be pages with conversions, the homepage, or high-traffic resource pages. This benchmark is one factor in determining if the new site is doing well.

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PAGES

TOP PAGES: Check your analytics for the top pages, landing pages, exit pages, etc. based on pageviews. This can provide a better understanding of which content is highly valuable to users.

Additionally, check for the time on page, bounce rate, and pages per session to help determine how well those pages are currently performing. If there is highly-viewed and valuable information for users, make sure that is included in the new website.

Finally, a top pages report is important so that if the site structure changes and new URLs are being used, you can set up the proper redirects for the user.

PAGE SPEED: Run the top pages through a page speed tester (WebPageTest and Lighthouse are both good resources) to see if your site is performant. Pages should load in 3 seconds or less.

Additional metrics besides the average page load time are available through site speed testers and can include first byte, first paint, start render, etc. These metrics provide insight into the different layers of loading and response (server response, template code, page specific code, images, etc.) that happen as your site becomes available to the user.

If your current site is not performant, there are likely a variety of factors including CMS, hosting, current code, etc. Discuss your performance results with your vendor to ensure that all factors are considered and planned for in the website redesign project.

Note, Google Analytics does provide an average page speed metric, but we prefer more detailed tools.

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USER OVERVIEW

DEMOGRAPHICS: Before determining your target market, it can be good to know who exactly is on your site already. Google Analytics can provide age and gender information for your site visitors, as well as other information such as affinity categories (lifestyles) and in-market audience (product-purchase interests).

GEOGRAPHY: Take a look at which cities, states, and countries have the most users and most converters. Depending on where these users are, you may need to use a CDN to help provide a performant experience.

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ENGAGEMENT OVERVIEW

CONVERSION RATE & TOTAL CONVERSIONS: These are mostly a benchmarking statistics, but it is good to know your site’s conversion rate and total conversions (goals, purchases, etc.) to help you determine whether the new website is performing better than the previous site.

Be sure to also note if specific channels or sources have higher conversion rates and more conversions than others.

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The topics below are ones we talk about all the time with current and prospective clients. Having ballpark budgets, timelines, and goals can help your project go more smoothly.

Establishing Project Expectations

Budgets — How much should I ask for? Unfortunately, there is no universal answer for every company to determine what a website redesign should cost its organization. Ultimately the budget allocated toward a website (whether iterative and small or dramatic and big) should be a function of the expected value an organization can expect to gain from investing in the effort.

Some factors that influence your site redesign budget:

Alternatively, if you operate as an independent contractor and are not looking to grow or scale your business, a large investment in your web presence is probably not warranted. Depending upon your customer’s expectations of your website, the website may be one you can construct yourself using a service like Wix or Squarespace (best for online brochure sites). If you have an online store, a tool like Shopify could meet your needs.

It is also rational for medium and large ecommerce companies that make millions or tens of millions annually to reinvest at least 10% of revenues back into web and marketing efforts.

The website is obviously the main or only source of revenue for ecommerce companies, and as such reinvesting in efforts to help the site increase traffic or improve conversions usually pays dividends.

Functional Complexity

(Such as editing capabilities/CMS integration, integrations with other software or tools, unique security requirements, or flashy animations)

Content quantity

Quality

Timeline

For example, a pharmaceutical company that just raised a significant round of funding and is looking to attract top talent may strongly consider a six figure plus project to rebrand and redesign its website. If this organization is able to attract the talent it needs to progress its product pipeline, obtain FDA approval, and commercialize its product or products, then the investment was worthwhile.

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What’s a reasonable timeline? The timeline depends on the size and complexity of the project. Almost every web project should start with a discovery effort to clearly define the functional and technical requirements of the project. This type of engagement with an agency typically involves at least an information architect, a technical/solutions architect, a project manager, and could also include personnel such as branding, marketing, design, security and other teams.

It is common to devote weeks or months worth of billable time for both the solutions architect and the information architect to specify functional and technical requirements respectively. These are typically devoted to activities such as:

Analytics review and analysis

Competitor analysis

Stakeholder interviews

End-user interviews

Contextual inquiries

Surveys

Build vs. buy analyses for any ancillary services required by the solution

Identification of integration points with other line-of-business or 3rd party systems

Identification of master and transactional data synchronization requirements, if any

Specification of data flows between the solution and other line-of-business or 3rd party systems

Preliminary and forward capacity planning, scalability model

Content audits

User journeys

Buyer personas

Sitemaps

Wireframes

Content management requirements

Recommended technology stack and deployment architecture

Recommended hosting service provider (PINT or 3rd party)

Information security and/or compliance requirement and security model

Conducting Research Tasks:

Creating Specification & Communication Documents:

While not all of these activities need to occur in every project, many are likely advantageous towards putting together a proper project plan. These also require some collaboration between the client and the web agency, which will take time to coordinate on each side given other priorities.

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After requirements are specified, the timeline for the design, development, and testing phases of the project also depend upon the size and complexity of the project. In most cases, at least a month should be devoted to design.

Custom development is the most difficult phase of the project to estimate. Depending upon the size and complexity of the development and programming required to build the site, the timeline will vary. If a proper functional and technical specification plan exists going into development (it always should) then the agency should be able to estimate a development timeline with a high degree of certainty.

Given all of these variables in a custom web project, it is usually a good idea to plan for the project to take at least six months (and even longer than that for complex projects or ones with a lot of stakeholders). Surely a web project can be finished in a much shorter period of time, but it is very unlikely that anyone will complain if the project is done early and you’ll lower your risk of missing a deadline or needing to pay rush fees to an agency to help meet your deadline.

Given all of these variables... it is usually a good idea to plan for the project to take at least six months.

This is another case where a designer should not be locked away in a closet working on one client’s design work for a dedicated month, but there should be buffer time to allow clients to provide feedback and the agency to iterate.

Because agencies are often working on many clients and projects, and the client has other priorities aside from managing the web project, buffer time should be planned to allow ample time for the agency to get creative and for the client to review design comps and provide feedback. It’s not a bad idea by any means to allot multiple months in your project plan just to design.

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Finding the Right Partner

In addition to high level goals, it may be helpful to come up with a gap analysis to understand what currently exists on your site and what you want on the new version of the site. The Project Needs Questionnaire at the end of this document is a more comprehensive guide to get you and your team thinking about the aspects of a redesign.

Remember — you don’t need to know the answers to all of these questions, but it’s helpful for you and the vendor you’re working with to recognize what you don’t know, and then figure out how to answers these questions through a project discovery phase.

Before You Reach Out Before speaking with a web agency, we recommend establishing high level goals for the project that can be communicated to agencies. Some questions to help you define goals might be:

It’s also a good idea to consider your values in a partner at this point. Are you looking for a well-established group that can execute complex designs on a tight timeline? Or would you rather save some money and go with a younger or smaller company? Do you value consistently usable sites, or cutting edge designs?

Remember that you’ll be working with these people for months, or even years — so take the time to make sure your goals, capabilities, and even personalities mesh well.

Deciding on a Vendor

Who is my website for?

What do I want website visitors to do when they come to my site?

What are some of the short-term and long-term goals for my company?

What will define a successful web project?

What kind of support will I need after the web project is complete?

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APPENDIX: Project Needs Questionnaire

Do you want an agency to redo your logo or will that stay the same?

Are there any other marketing assets that will need to be redesigned along with the website? (i.e. PowerPoints, Marketing brochures, email signatures etc.) If so, please provide those or detail what those assets are.

Can you send the agency some sites that you like and don’t like from a design perspective?

Do you have brand guidelines or a design system?

If not, would it be helpful to have one moving forward?

Would you like to do a custom photoshoot for the project or should the agency use stock photography?

How many unique homepage designs would you like to see in the beginning of the creative process?

How many rounds of design iterations would you like included in scope?

Does your site need to support ecommerce?

Does your website need to identify users coming to the site? (i.e. login area)

Does your site have an investors section hosted by a third party? If so, which one?

Does your site have a careers section hosted by a third party? If so, which one?

Will your website have videos? Can they be hosted on Youtube, Vimeo, or a similar service or do they need to be embedded within the website?

If content management is desired, how many levels of permissions are needed to support your approval workflow?

What regulatory requirements does your website need to support?

What lead capture mechanisms are needed on the site (i.e. contact form, newsletter signup, etc.)

What third party integrations does the site have today?

Are there any known integrations you want that do not currently exist?

DESIGN NEEDS

FUNCTIONALITY

INTEGRATIONS

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What is your CMS, if any?

What is your CRM system, if any?

What is your ERP system, if any?

What is your marketing automation platform, if any?

What is your email marketing platform, if any?

What is your payment processor, if any?

Can or should these systems connect to your website?

How might integrating these systems improve your business processes?

Will your website need new content moving forward?

Will your team be able to provide new content for the site or would you rely on the agency to develop or provide recommendations?

How many pages is your current site?

How many pages are expected moving forward?

How many content contributors will exist for the site moving forward?

Is organic search important to you? If so, why?

Is paid search important to you? If so, why?

Is social media important to you? If so, why?

Do you have Google Analytics set up on your site?

Do you have any other analytics platforms?

Where is your site currently hosted?

Do you have any hard requirements around website hosting moving forward?

What is your operating system?

Who manages DNS?

Does the current site have a source code repository? If so, which one?

Does your current site have development, stage, and production environments? If not, what environments does your current site have?

Would you like any monitoring reports or services related to hosting?

ANCILLARY SYSTEMS

CONTENT

MARKETING & ANALYTICS

HOSTING & DEVOPS

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Do you want your site to support in-site search? Why?

Do you have any specific requirements around in-site search?

What is your expected budget for a one-time project?

What is your expected annual website maintenance and support budget?

Do you have a hard deadline for this project? If so, when?

If not, when is a reasonable range of expected dates to complete the project?

Can you appoint a main point of contact from your company to this project?

How many hours per week can they be expected to work on this project?

How many other company stakeholders will be involved in this process?

Is there anything not in this checklist that is important to your project?

SITE SEARCH

BUDGET & TIMELINE

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

MISCELLANEOUS