Is It Time To Redesign Your Website? Part 2

Originally posted on my LinkedIn profile May 2015

In Part One of this three-part blog series, I reviewed the initial assessment one needs to make before undertaking a website redesign. This is Part Two.

Part 2 -  Groundwork

So, you've determined that it is time to redesign your website, and you have identified the objectives you hope to achieve by doing so (don't overlook this piece - these will be the criteria by which you measure your success). The next phase of this project is figuring out what and whom should be part of the redesign project.

Personas

Start by getting a handle on who your website is serving. There will be multiple audiences, so it is extremely helpful to build out a set of user personas. This exercise will give you clarity into your website visitors, and provide you with a sort of touchstone against which to measure your functionality and content. Personas force you to understand your user objectives, their journey throughout the various pages of your website, how they arrived there in the first place, and what actions they will likely want to take once they get there. The typical visitors to a law firm website will include:

• Buyers of legal services (e.g., In-house Counsel and Chief Legal Officers)
• Lateral partners (attorneys considering working at the firm)
• Media (journalists and media researching and writing about the firm)
• Business professionals (administrative staff looking for positions in marketing, HR, finance, IT, and operations)

You should create a persona for each key visitor type. Here is a subset of personas we developed when redesigning my firm's website:  

Recommended reading: Smashing Magazine's Shlomo Goltz on developing user  personas.

Stakeholder Interviews

Stakeholder interviews are critical to understanding what your stakeholders hope to achieve in the redesign. Work with your executive champion to determine who should be included as a stakeholder, but be sure to include anyone who has a vested interest in the success of your site. For my website redesign, I include the Marketing department (primary content owners), the Human Resources department (our Careers pages are the second most visited pages on the site), and practice leaders. Ideally, you will also be able to interview clients to find out what they need from your website.

Each interview will take between 45 and 60 minutes, so you will need to prioritize your list of stakeholders. If at all possible, I recommend including your designers and developers in this phase, because what you hear and document might be very different from what they hear. (And when a practice leader insists on adding some random element, the designer and developer can help get to the bottom of what the true requirement is and how best it can be addressed.)

I also conducted a firmwide survey with 10 basic questions to suss out what employees (both attorneys and staff) thought needed to be included in the redesign. This goes a long way toward making people feel heard, and taking them on the redesign journey with you.

Recommended reading: Paul Boag on How to Improve Your Site Using Stakeholder Interviews.

Content Audit

This is where you measure and evaluate all of your website assets. Start by measuring the current traffic to the various sections of your website. Be careful about making automatic assumptions about low-traffic areas; maybe it isn't reflective of the desire for the content, but rather the quality of the content.

When evaluating content, ask yourself:

• Does it help you achieve your business goals?
• Does it speak to at least one of your personas?
• Is it consistent with your brand style guide?
• Is it redundant?
• Is it relevant?
• Is it optimized for search engine optimization?

If you are rewriting whole sections of your website, or creating entirely new sections, be sure to prioritize. No matter how well you plan, timelines will get tight and you may need to postpone rewriting certain elements. When that time comes, you will want to know you have been spending your efforts on the right things.And please, if I can emphasize only one thing: pare down. Users don't read websites, they skim them - so don't make them have to work for the information they seek.

Recommended reading: Anything by the Nielsen Norman Group on writing for the web.

Coming Up: Part 3 - Redesign

This will be the final post in a three-part blog series on website redesign.

• Project Kickoff
• Wireframes
• Design
• Build
• Content Population
• Testing
• Rollout

Is It Time to Redesign Your Website? Part 1

Originally posted on my LinkedIn profile May 2015

A hot topic among my peers in digital marketing is web redesign. More specifically, what are the basic steps involved in creating and launching a new website - and how do you know you even need one? In my view, you can break a website redesign project into three phases. This post contains Phase 1.

Part 1 - Discovery

Current State Review

Do you need a full redesign or just a refresh? Start by asking yourself the following key questions:

• Are you achieving the desired results with your current website? This involves looking at your website analytics and search engine optimization (SEO), as well as that of your competitors.
• Has your branding changed recently? This isn't just a design consideration; if your new brand includes a change of tone in how you write about your products / services, then you should revisit all of your content to ensure it complies with the new organizational voice.
• Is there new technology out there (such as responsive design) that will enable you to improve the user experience? If your website is not mobile-friendly, you are missing out on an increasingly large visitor audience. And if your website won't render properly on new browser versions, then I strongly suggest a redesign. Users have no patience for a bad experience, and will move on to your competitors.
• Has your organization experienced significant restructuring? If so, you likely need to change how you promote your offerings.

If the answers to these questions point to "Yes, we need a redesign to achieve our business objectives," then you need to look inside your organization to see if you are ready. 

Capability Assessment

• Resources: Undertake an internal assessment to see if you are ready and able to begin this project. Do you have people you need, such as a project manager, a writer, a designer?
• Priorities: Are there competing priorities? Your marketing team might be leading the charge, but if you also need the support of your IT department then you must make sure they are on board with this effort.
• Budget: Determining the budget for a website redesign depends largely on the number of features you want and what kind of business you are in (ecommerce? blog-heavy? multi-language? etc. etc.) so I can't answer this one. What I will say is that you get what you pay for, so don't focus on selecting the lowest-cost option. I recommend networking with your peers and asking them for ballpark numbers on their last redesign.
• Executive champion: In two words, Get One. You will need to present a business case to the person who signs off on big projects. This person will be your go-to to help clear internal roadblocks. The most important thing you need to do for your champion is manage expectations and deliver on commitments. Don't make your champion look dumb by not keeping them informed every step along the way.

Coming Up: Part 2 -  Groundwork

(Now published.)

This will be the second post in a three-part blog series on website redesign.

• Personas
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Content Audit

Coming Up: Part 3 - Redesign

This will be the final post in a three-part blog series on website redesign.

• Project Kickoff
• Wireframes
• Design
• Build
• Content Population
• Testing
• Rollout