Know your organization’s website desperately needs a redesign, yet you’re dragging your feet to get started? There’s a good and simple reason for that: Redesigns can be really hard.
When you’re already underwater with work and managing a budget, the idea of adding a project that impacts your entire company and customers can really leave you gasping for breath. There’s the obvious concerns about resourcing -- Who is going to work on this? Can we afford it? How are we going to have the time for this?
There’s also the reservations about getting buy-in from various stakeholders with very different needs and opinions. Go a little deeper into the project, and you start to worry about how much technical debt (or imperfect code) your site currently has from past quick and dirty development decisions, or how much different content needs transferred over.
In this presentation, JAKALA (formerly FFW) talks with our client Smile Train about how we effectively addressed these fears during Smile Train’s website redesign, and how you can apply this to your own project.
This presentation was originally intended for nonprofits, but these tips apply to anyone with a website.
Be inclusive with the discovery process: Adding more opinions to the mix might feel like it would stifle progress or cause your project to go off the rails, but we’ve found it can actually help navigate the process, keep employees excited and engaged about the new redesign, and create less mess down the line.
Base decisions on data, not opinions: One way to counteract the subjective feedback you’ll get when including multiple stakeholders is to use data to inform decisions, like Smile Train did. They had an overabundance of content and needed to prioritize what would be transferred to the new site. Looking at analytics on what data was performing the best helped them accomplish this.
Let the mission and vision lead the way: Your mission and vision create a north star to help guide your organization as a whole, and should be the driving force behind your strategy.
A website redesign isn’t something you should try and tackle on your own. We’ve helped many organizations like Smile Train through the process, from providing an in-depth and inclusive discovery, to actually redesigning the site and empowering them to manage their site’s content. Let’s start the conversation on how we can help with your next digital project.
