A redesign usually comes up the moment somebody stops liking the website. That is the weakest reason I know. Here is when redoing a website makes sense, when it does not, and what most often goes wrong along the way.
Five reasons a redesign makes sense
1. The website cannot be maintained. Changing a phone number means writing to somebody who gets back to you in a week. That on its own is worth a redesign.
2. It is unusable on a phone. Most people look at websites on a phone these days. If they have to zoom in and scroll sideways, they leave.
3. The website is falling apart or going down. Typically with page builders assembled from plugins by different authors. One update and the order form stops working.
4. The company has changed. You do something different, you want to sell something different, you are in a different price bracket. The website stayed where you were five years ago.
5. The websites of the people you compete with look a class better. The customer compares you side by side whether you like it or not.
Three situations where you should keep your money
The website is two years old and it works. Age on its own is not a reason. If it can be maintained, it is fast and people find what they need on it, leave it alone.
You do not like it, but your customers do not mind it. Your taste and your customer’s taste are not the same thing. Before you put a few thousand euros into it, ask five clients what they were missing on the website.
The real problem is somewhere else. If enquiries are not coming because you are three classes more expensive than everyone around you and you explain that nowhere, a new look will not fix it.
A redesign is work on the content and the structure. The look is what follows from it.
What most often goes wrong in a redesign
The page addresses get thrown away. The new website has a different structure and the old addresses stop working. Search engines and links from other people’s websites suddenly lead nowhere. The fix is simple and it is done before launch: the old address has to redirect permanently to the new one. I want you to demand that from whoever builds your website.
Only the look gets redone. The texts are copied across one to one, including the ones nobody understood. The website then looks new and works just as badly.
Things that were working disappear. Sometimes the old website has a page that half the traffic goes to. Before anything is deleted, somebody needs to look at the statistics.
Nobody carries the content over. References, photos of finished jobs, documents to download. There is usually more of it than anyone expects.
How I approach a redesign
First I look at what works on the old website and I keep that. Then we go through what the website is supposed to do and who it is supposed to say it to. Only after that do we deal with how it will look. I sort the page addresses out before launch, not after.
I write my own code, without ready-made plugins by other authors. Those are usually the reason a website falls apart after a while and has to be redone.
