The Work That Comes Before a Website Redesign
Website projects have a habit of becoming design projects very quickly.
Once a business decides its current website needs replacing, attention naturally turns to what the new one should look like. Examples of other websites start circulating, discussions begin about photography and page layouts, and somebody starts mapping out the navigation.
Those conversations all need to happen, but there is useful work to do before the creative process begins.
A website has a job to do for the business. Establishing that role, deciding what deserves attention, and gathering the evidence needed to support the story gives the people designing, writing, and building it a much stronger starting point.
Start with the job the website needs to do
Not every business needs the same thing from its website. For some, its primary role is generating inquiries. For others, prospective customers have already heard of the company and the site needs to support a longer sales process by demonstrating experience and capability.
A business entering a new market may need to establish its credentials with an audience that does not know it yet. Another may be trying to win larger contracts and needs stronger support for those conversations. Recruitment may also be important, particularly where growth depends on attracting people with specialist skills.
Most websites will serve several purposes, but establishing the priorities at the outset creates a commercial basis for the project. A site intended primarily to support complex sales conversations, for example, will need a different structure and content mix from one expected to generate a high volume of inquiries.
Don't assume the current structure is the right one
One of the easiest approaches to a redesign is to carry the existing website structure into the new one. It already exists, everyone recognizes it, and it provides an immediate list of pages to work from.
The difficulty is that websites accumulate content over time. A legacy service may still have a prominent place in the navigation because it has always had its own page, while a newer capability the business actively wants to grow is buried several levels down because it was added later. Pages created for old campaigns remain in place, and several sections may now be saying broadly the same thing.
Acquisition can make this even more pronounced. A business that has brought several companies or capabilities together may be left with a site that still reflects the separate organizations, terminology, and service structures that existed before the acquisitions. Reproducing that structure in a new design simply carries the history forward.
A redesign creates an opportunity to decide what should lead, what can be combined, and what no longer earns a place. Those choices should reflect the company's current commercial priorities rather than the order in which content happened to accumulate.
Find the evidence before the copywriting starts
A business may have plenty of evidence behind its claims without having it documented in a form that can be used on the website.
The project details may sit with somebody in operations. Results may never have been formally captured. A long-standing customer may be happy to provide a testimonial, but nobody has asked. A strong example of the company's work may exist only as a few photographs and the knowledge of the people who delivered it.
Finding this out when somebody is already trying to write the case-study page slows the project down and can leave the finished site making claims it cannot properly substantiate.
An evidence audit early in the process gives the team time to collect what is missing and identify the examples that best support the work the company wants to win. It also helps determine where case studies, results, credentials, and other proof should sit within the site rather than treating them as material to add at the end.
Give the creative team something useful to work with
Designers, developers, and writers can only work with what they are given. A collection of competitor websites, the existing sitemap, and a request to make the site look more modern says very little about the commercial role of the finished site.
The project brief should set out the main objective, priority audiences, the services or capabilities that need emphasis, the evidence available, and the action the business wants visitors to take. Practical requirements such as forms, integrations, or recruitment functionality can then be captured alongside those priorities.
This does not require an enormous strategy exercise before anybody can start designing. It requires enough work upfront that the creative team is not being asked to settle business questions through design.
Without that groundwork, the first concepts can become the point at which unresolved issues finally surface. One stakeholder sees a service that should have been given more weight. Another disagrees with the way the company is being described. Copy is reopened because the underlying proposition was never settled, and new requirements appear because seeing the site take shape forces conversations that could have happened earlier.
A well-prepared brief gives those discussions a shared starting point and allows the specialists delivering the website to concentrate on doing their jobs well.
Let the design do its job
Once the commercial role, content priorities, and available evidence have been established, the design team can make informed choices about structure, visual hierarchy, functionality, and the overall experience of using the site.
A website redesign is a significant investment of time as well as money. The work that happens before design helps make sure that investment produces a site built around the business's current priorities, rather than simply a newer version of the one it replaced.
If you're planning a website redesign, Crown Rock can help define the role the site needs to play, determine which content and evidence will support it, and turn that thinking into a practical brief. We can also bring together the specialist content, design, and digital support needed to take the project through to delivery. Get in touch.
