How to plan a website redesign – and the best mistakes to avoid

There are so many things that can go wrong that I will only mention a few that are important from my experience and that occur most frequently. Most problems can be easily avoided. These are related to the process and organizational issues – you still need a good designer, of course.

1. No strategy

No matter how trivial it may sound, but building a website without a clear strategy is like searching the unknown forest without a map. It may be an interesting adventure, but it is unlikely to achieve a goal this way. By strategy, I mean the overarching corporate goals, product policy, target group definition and the role of the various channels in marketing and sales. An astonishing number of companies, even large ones, do not have this information ready when the process begins.

2. The taste determines, not the goal

A company website is first and foremost a tool. It should look good, of course, but first and foremost it should work well. This means that the most important things are the structure, the content and the mechanisms for selling and other customer interactions such as collecting leads, exchanging information with customers such as product inquiries, complaint management or recruiting talent on the careers page.

In many cases, however, most of the time is spent discussing the images on the homepage, the style of pictograms, the colors and other less crucial things. Obviously, these points also have an influence on the effect, but a good designer knows how to deal with them. But unfinished discussions about the look and feel are a key factor in setbacks and frustrations on all sides.

3. The wrong briefing

The project briefing is usually packed with information and has been developed after a long series of internal meetings and workshops. Unfortunately, most of the briefings I received were still not very helpful. They contained the company history, a specification and a vague idea of the look and feel (“contemporary design”, etc.). But they didn’t list what results were expected from the relaunch, explain the role of the website in corporate communications or give an idea of what the website should cover in terms of content.

4. The project team is far too large

We do not yet have any experimental confirmation, but anecdotal experience shows that project time increases exponentially with the number of people involved. Too many people involved often means that the project manager finds it increasingly difficult to keep the hat on, take responsibility, make quick decisions and give approvals because far too many people involved discuss a lot and often change their minds – all of which brings with it many change requests. It also makes it increasingly difficult to plan workshops because scheduling alone requires so much coordination. This is one of the most critical factors slowing down the whole process.

5. Decision-makers are involved too late and in the wrong context

Deus ex machina is one of the most popular scenarios for a web design project. After a few weeks or even months of intensive work and an infinite number of decisions by the project team, someone from the management asks for a general approval. This can go well, but quite often this very busy person will ask for a few more changes without knowing the context or process of how certain decisions were arrived at and what basic assumptions and premises led to them.
Because of their position, these changes are usually adopted, and in some cases the comments are actually helpful, but just as often they can also call into question the consistency of a design.

6. Lack of trust in designers and developers

If you need a surgeon, you don’t explain to him how to proceed and how to plan the treatment. With a design team, it’s often very different – suddenly everyone wants to be an integral part of the team. In many cases, they also bring a lot of experience and knowledge to the table, but in most cases the designers have a certain experience advantage in their field. Design as a committee process is often not a good idea. This approach also works against the project time.

7. Waterfall processes

Another factor that speeds up the process is to segment it into individual steps such as analysis, information architecture, functional design, graphic design and front-end implementation. Agencies that proceed in this way do so to ensure that there are no more changes once they start programming.

However, it can take weeks before the functional design (also known as mockups or prototypes) is developed and agreed. During this time, all the other specialists are idle and waiting for their turn.

Assuming that the agency is fully trusted and that there are no major changes to the overall concept, it can proceed in a completely different way. The project can then be developed and made live in individual blocks, speeding up the whole process.

8. Contents missing

Many companies pay less attention to the actual content of the website until the functional test page is finally ready. Much too late. The designers should be able to work with real content right from the start. In our team we often say: “Lorem ipsum is dead”, and that means: you can’t develop a good product with fake content. The design must take images, descriptions and real products into account, otherwise it will just be a nice design, but not the design of your company website.