10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign

8/6/2019 10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign

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10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign

Web professionals who have "been there, done that" share some pointers.By Karine Joly

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Email This ArticleYou might call 2006 the year of the redesign for

institutions of higher education. Duke University (N.C.), BrownUniversity, Ball State University (Ind.), Humboldt State University

(Calif.), Virginia Tech, and Centenary College (N.J.) are among thegroup of IHEs who redesigned their sites. Over the past few months,

many other new website looks have been announced or unveiled.

Expect some opposition and criticism from staff, faculty, students, alumni, and

even donors for changing "their" website.

If you haven't redesigned your site yet, chances are that process will come your way soon.Selected from the suggestions of a few higher ed web professionals behind recent successful

website redesigns, the following tips should help in the endeavor.

1. Define strategic goals.

Don't embark on a website redesign only to keep up with the neighbors. You should expect

some vocal students, upset faculty and staff members, angry alumni, and even puzzled donorcriticize, oppose, and fight you for messing with "their" website. That's why you need to com

up with quantifiable goals for your redesign. "Clearly define the purpose of the redesign, andput it in writing," advises Andrea Arbogast, web manager at Humboldt. She rolled out a

redesign this August. "I have found a short document with the redesign's purpose to beinvaluable. There is usually a very concrete reason for taking on a redesign, and being able to

articulate it easily has saved me a lot of grief," adds Arbogast.

2. Do your homework.

You wouldn't renovate your house without researching the city code, thinking about the need

of your family, or browsing magazines for inspiration. So, do your homework as well beforejumping into a web redesign project. Find out as much as possible about the current state of

your website by analyzing web traffic data and feedback from users. Also take the time to lemore about your target audiences' needs and expectations by setting up online surveys, focus

groups, face-to-face interviews, or usability tests.

"Before we began any work on site architecture or design concepts, we devoted several montto research," explains Michael Dame, director of Web Communications at Virginia Tech. "W


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interviewed members of our primary audiences-students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni-t

find out how they use the university's website. Our findings informed later decisions regardinsite architecture, navigation, and design."

3. Don't forget ADA and web standards.

If you plan to tear down the walls of your website, make sure you rebuild a compliant andfunctional web presence for your institution. Technologies, standards, and user expectations

have changed a lot over the past few years. Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Adefines ground rules to assure your website is accessible to disabled users. Make sure your

redesign is compliant.

4. Put on your project manager hat.

A website redesign is a project and should be managed as such with a defined scope, a given

budget, and a defined set of resources. Set up a realistic schedule and manage expectations.

Aggressive timelines will force you to cut corners or bypass necessary consultation. "You neat least one person who is a wizard at organizing people, details, and workflow," says Lisa

Cameron-Norfleet, program manager of developer relations for the Office of WebCommunications at Cornell University, who worked on its 2004 web redesign.

5. Spend quality time with your content.

A website redesign is the best time for a content audit. Once you know more about your user

expectations and needs, start to review and reorganize your website content. After auditing y

web content, you'll be able to assess the gaps between the current state of your website and tinformation architecture that will best serve your users.

6. Invite feedback, but refrain from doing a redesign by democracy or by committee.

Any change in the design of your institution's website will get noticed. That's why it's so

important to get as much buy-in as you can before and during the process. "Real transparenckey," says Ben Riseling, web operations manager at Duke. "Was this audience groupconsulted?" is the question that he heard repeated the most. While communication and buy-in

are critical to the success of these projects, redesigns by democracy or by committee shouldavoided. They don't work most of the time. "Our redesign blog was a crucial tool in showing

our audience what was in the works and establishing a conversation about the new site. Youhave to be careful to set the tone of such a blog, though. We made sure it was very clear that

would listen to all ideas, but that the site was not being built by a democracy," says CameronNorfleet.

7. Don't forget to test as you redesign.

Make sure that the new design works by having a few members of your target audiences test

your ideas and layouts as soon as possible. Test your paper or interactive wireframes (the

documents showing the information skeleton of your pages) before picking the fonts or the


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photos. Try to launch your redesigned home page in private or public beta first. "About sixweeks before launch, we posted a 'sneak preview' section on the university's website to

inform and solicit feedback. And, a month before launch, we opened up the staging site to allfaculty, staff, and students for testing and further feedback," says Dame.

8. Get a CMS when you redesign.

If you plan to fix your website information architecture, navigation, design, and content, you

might want to kill two birds with one stone and couple your redesign with theimplementation of a web content management system. "Getting a site on a good CMS makes

it easier to maintain and also enables it to seamlessly syndicate content," says Riseling.Beyond the power of syndicated content, a good CMS will make your next redesign

implementation a breeze by separating content from design. Next time around, you will beable to focus only on redesigning the templates used by the application to produce on the fly

the thousand of pages composing your website.

9. Embrace incremental redesigns (rather than redesigning every two or three years).

When it comes to redesign, bigger isn't always better. Major overhauls often generate a lot of

resistance from constituents and can even upset your most fervent users. That's why somemajor names on the web, such as Amazon and eBay, don't redesign their websites anymore.

They prefer to roll out any major changes slowly. Small changes prevent these companiesfrom disorienting or losing their customers. Another benefit of the incremental approach lies

in the eyes of your budget holder: Most of the time, small changes can be implementedquickly by your team and cost less.

10. Don't worry.

If you're looking for more tips, you can read all the information and advice gathered inpreparation for this column at www.collegewebeditor.com/redesign.

Top 4 Website Redesign Mistakes

The typical web agency or web consultant probably has more website redesigns under his or her belt than

anybody in your institution. Michael Stoner, president of mStoner (www.mstoner.com), and David Heidenreich,

executive vice president of strategy and marketing for Ripple Effects Interactive (www.r-effects.com), were

asked to identify the most common mistakes higher education institutions make when redesigning their web

presence. Here are four of them.

1. Thinking of your project as a redesign project when it's actually about "redeveloping" the site. Sometimes

what you need to do is to make your website look better, fresher, and more au courant. But-much more often-

you need to rethink many aspects of your web presence. (Stoner)

2. Missing the target. Higher ed web marketers must avoid developing the website for internal audiences (faculty,

staff, etc.). A .edu website must absolutely target prospective students and those who influence their decisions,

including parents and high school counselors. (Heidenreich)


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3. Paying too much attention to the look and feel and neglecting content. Sure, people make a snap judgment

about a site based on its look and feel, so it has to look great. But I'm continually astounded by all the time

people spend focusing on color, neglecting content completely. Ensuring that key messages appear across many

pages on the site is a hard, but essential, component of a great website. (Stoner)

4. Packing up after the launch. Establishing a new site design is the foundation for your web marketing strategy,

but it's only the first step. It's important to continue to feed the site with new content and features that align withyour marketing strategies. (Heidenreich)

http://collegewebeditor.com/blog/index.php/highered/categories/website-redesign/ ---More Info

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10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign