A Business owner’s Guide to the 6 Phases of a Website Redesign

Website is the first place where your customers, prospects, media, competitors, investors, friends and job candidates turn to when learning more about your business and its products or services.

Because of these facts, it’s essential that you as business owner must take a leadership role in website redesign project.

To help you avoid any common mistakes, we have developed a free eBook — “A Business owner’s Guide to Website Redesign”. This eBook details the six main steps involved in the website redesign process.

This eBook is developed for a business owner who doesn’t have a technology background and want business growth through redesigning of old website.

1. The Preparation

For every business owners it’s very important to save and invest time in most productive task so to avoid delays, take the time to gather all necessary information upfront, before it is needed. Items to gather include:

• Analytics tracking codes.
• Logo files in a vector format (i.e. .EPS, .AI, or .CDR).
• Main contact information for current website host.
• Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Site Explorer verification codes.
• Branding guidelines and all relevant collateral documents.

2. Planning & Discovery

Planning makes it perfect.

If you are thinking to redesign your website, it’s absolutely perfect time to define the most important aspects of your new site so you get more leads, more happy clients and make more money.

Here few things to discuss:

• Buyer personas.
• Site objectives.
• Call to action
• Color scheme.
• Page layout and design preferences.
• Site features and functionality.

3. Design & Structure

Now you have done all planning it’s time to think about design & Structure.

To help communicate your vision of the new website, develop a comprehensive creative brief, detailing everything you defined in phase two. Your web team will use this as a guide when designing and building out your new site.

At minimum your creative brief should include:

• Graphic sitemap outlining all pages on your site, including main navigation options.
• Page layout and design preferences, with screen shots or URLs of examples.
• Color scheme, including primary, secondary and accent colors.
• Navigation options you want available on the site.

4. Content & Optimization

Content is King…

Visitors don’t come to your site for the cool design or fancy navigation; they come for the content. Develop content that is concise, scannable and engaging. It needs to deliver the key message quickly and clearly, and then drive visitors to take a desired call to action.

When developing content, consider the following suggestions:

• Create a keyword map that assigns each page on your site a priority keyword (or two) for which it will be optimized.
• Define the tone and style of your content.
• Assign the development of website copywriting to your team’s strongest writer (avoid using multiple authors).
• Optimize each page after the content has been created.

5. Build Out & Quality Assurance

This is the phase where all your hard work comes to fruition. It includes populating the site with all content, setting up 301 redirects, and completing a thorough review of the site to ensure that everything displays and works properly.

To streamline the upload process:

• Create an upload cheatsheet that will serve as a how-to guide for adding content into your content management system (CMS).
• Before loading content, create all the pages first, and organize them according to your sitemap.
• Upload all images and graphics into a designated folder in the CMS so they are easy to locate when it comes time to add them to a page.
• Put together a team internally or hire professionals to upload all content and formatting into the web pages.
• Perform a quality assurance by checking to make sure all formatting is correct, all links and features work, and that everything displays properly across all browsers.

6. The Launch

Finally, launch the new website and ensure it is being indexed accurately by Google and other search engines. To do this, take the time to:

• Check that all 301 redirects are working.
• Log into each search engine’s webmaster center to confirm all verification code is installed properly, and then submit your XML sitemap.
• Verify that all analytics tracking code is installed.
• Review Google Webmaster Tools every few days to ensure there are no pages Google had indexed on your old site that it can no longer find.