Step 1: Ask 7 Questions
Recently I developed 7 simple questions to start any web redesign or creation project with. They are very high level and force the owner to think about their project and what they hope to accomplish with it. They also re-enforce that only through defined measurable goals can you evaluate success. I'll list them below, but know that it's designed to be an interview style questionnaire so not a "fire this off and get a response" type document.
- Are
you trying to re-brand/re-engineer an existing site? What is it’s current
URL and technology, do you currently utilize any type of content
management system?
If you do not have an existing website for this project then you may skip questions #2 & #3 - Have
you gathered information from current “public” users of the site as to
their complaints of the current site? If so would you share those with us?
- Are
you utilizing Google Analytics? What google analytics reports have you
leveraged to research viewing habits of your site? Have any google reports
made an impact on the decision to redesign, if so which ones?
- Who
is the primary audience for your site? Does it have a sectional audiences?
If so, what are those sections and audience combinations, what is the
approx. percentage of your site dedicated to each of those sections?
- How
much staff will you have available on a bi-weekly basis to perform regular
review of the site as it’s developed? This review team must include someone from executive management
(ideally this would be the PIO) should also include a representative from
each of the CORE areas within your organization. Information
Technology staff may be included at your discretion but this is primarily
to establish that we are hitting the mark on the needs of the content
owners.
- How
much staff will you have available to maintain the site once it goes live?
How do you plan on coordinating changes to the site between divisions and
up to your PIO for approval? Who will do the actual site changes, IT staff
or general users?
- How will you measure if the site is successful? What metrics will you be looking at? Do you have established goals, conversions or events in google analytics already? Is that something you’re looking to implement to gauge success, if so what are the details for those?
Step 2: Take another look for goals
#7 from above asked the owner how they would measure success so you probably have a good idea of how you should be looking at the project, but rarely does the owner look at the entire picture. So put on your analytical hat and look for yourself. While digging through the site look for these items and ask these questions, any of which could be something to measure.
- Where is the real data of the site? Is it in web pages or is the real data buried in PDF or word documents on the site. buried data is useless data in today's mobile world. Look at the download count of those documents, then talk about exposing that data via actual web pages instead. If it's critical data it should be surfaced in the web browser not some 3rd party extension or application. Once this is done compare the page hit count to the download count, Likelihood is that the page count will be much higher and that means the customer message is reaching more people than before!
- Are there any forms on the site? Are those PDFs or Word Documents? Again forcing a user to download and print a form means lost audience and lost interactions. Even online PDF forms are troublesome to use within some browsers because of compatibility issues. Forms should be exposed in the web page just like important data. The ability to fill out a form within the browser is key to more submissions and having the ability to track the success, plus it means it's already in an electronic format that can easily be integrated with other systems.
- If documents need to be in downloadable fashion which documents are important to track specific download information for? Identify those and track their downloads so they can be quickly reported.
- Are there areas of inefficiency? For example do they maintain copies of information in two separate areas of the site? Do they utilize roll-up areas correctly or are table of content type pages maintained manually required additional effort when child content changes? Look for opportunities to modernize and automate, often times this means changing the behavior of the webmaster or web author, this is the trickiest work of all but preach the time-saving and you can usually get them to come around.
- Identify information bloat, it's a common condition that companies treat their website as a giant dumping ground with the attitude that everything needs to be on it. The truth is "less IS more", analytics can usually show you the pages that have no or extremely no hits and unless those are areas of focus for the customer then maybe they don't need to be there. Everything on the website should be desired by the visitor and direct to the intention of the website owner. If something doesn't pass either of these tests then maybe you should go live without it and that one time a year someone asks for it through the contact us form just email it to them instead.
Step 3: One bite at a time
When eating an elephant take one bite at a time
- Creighton Abrams
Gone is the day when someone could come to you with a 10-20 page website and you could mock everything up, present it, get approval, code it and put it on the web. Now most sites have hundreds, if not thousands of pages, and the number of functional components sometimes out number the employees. Trying to dump an entire site into the lap of a customer for review is a recipe for disaster, instead it's a good idea to give them manageable bits. Decide on a road-map for deliverables in small bits, identifying areas which can be isolated and completed independent of each other or as a result of one another being completed. This becomes your project plan and development calendar.
My suggestion is to start by establishing the Framework, meaning the overall visual style of the homepage and inner-page. Include things like the header, footer and heading styles. These can all be mocked in Photoshop or whatever other graphics program you have. They create a foundation onto which all the other content can be laid.
Then move on to either functional areas or logical areas of the site. So for example "About Us", start a cycle of...
- Discovery
- Design
- Review
- Coding/Content Migration
- Accessibility Testing
- User Testing
- Sign-off
Those astute of you may see a Agile sprint here and you'd be right.
I know none of this is ground breaking or should be at least to most anyone but the reality is most developers in the web just plow headstrong into the project with the thought that planning and cycles slow things down.
Step 4: Pieces make a whole
Even though you got sign-off as you went along there is still a level of testing and sign-off needed once all the pieces are together to endure. Traditionally this is known as the "soft launch" and is a crucial phase of the process because it allows you to sample out the website to potential visitors and find real errors prior to it going live to the masses. During this time you also begin to collect metrics on the goals you placed into the application. this early collection lets you know if the metrics you designed are what you need or if maybe you are collecting too much information and need to scale back prior to launch.
If custom development was involved in your build this phase also will also act as a first sign of any "scaling" issues you may encounter. Soft opens are common place in many industries and we should learn from their best practices to help our go-lives be as successful as possible.
Step 5: It's not over when it's over
Reflections aren't just for mirrors or ponds. It's important 6 months and a year later to revisit your website and compare your metrics to your anticipated goals. If you had previous numbers under the old site then now is the time to compare those, don't expect day 1 numbers to be the same as day 365, it takes a while for users to get used to even the most user-friendly site revamp.
If you didn't have metrics on the previous site then don't despair, you can still compare month to month values on the new site to see user adoption as people got used to your new site. Also remember that your website should not remain static, it's a living thing and should be fed and cleaned up after regularly. Feeding should include new content to keep people visiting your site to see whats new, it can be blog posts, news articles or customer reviews. Cleaning of existing content should also be done to make sure content doesn't become incorrect or outdated with changes in your business process and mission.
