5 Key Factors To Consider When Redesigning A Website

You have invested untold effort to create an eye-catching web presence. Unfortunately, things change and your needs are no exception: You need to figure out how to create a successful web design and ensure that your site remains usable, accessible and optimized for search engines. Even worse, you don’t have a ton of time to get the job done, and the pressure builds by the second. Below we discuss key factors to consider when redesigning a website.

Redesigning a website

  1. Lay the groundwork early for faster rework

  • The only rule to remember is to plan thoroughly in advance and not change things before you reach your destination.
  • Moving the goalposts can scuttle any otherwise promising project before it has a chance to shine. The problem is so pervasive in software engineering and digital content creation that it even has a special name: scope creep.
  • When you meet with your team, these preliminary ideas will give you essential inspiration and help you determine whether what you want to do is even feasible. Once you’ve reached agreement on what you’re going to tackle, set it in stone to prevent your project from deviating as you work.

  1. Master collaborative web design workflows

  • One obvious way to quickly revamp websites is to bring in as much talent as possible. This is not hard to justify: If more people are involved in the same task, it can help to progress faster.
  • The problem is that not all web redesign tools are ideal for collaboration, such as systems that rely on static templates and themed layouts. Although it may seem counterintuitive, these frameworks can actually hinder creativity by preventing you from making the necessary changes at will.
  • By having the ability to modify components and features on the page, rather than having to add new plugins or third-party tools, template-free workflows allow for experimentation and problem-solving, both foundations of highly effective teamwork.

  1. Use tools that remove the backend

  • Site redesign projects shouldn’t require deep dives into hosting, security, or other areas of managing your digital presence. Ideally, a redesign project should be limited to the layout, interactivity, responsiveness, and other directly experiential elements of your website.
  • The redesign editor or CMS platform you choose must offer guarantees that basic functionality won’t change just because the look of the site changes. To maximize speed, you should be able to deploy new concepts immediately and test them as you go.
  • Waiting until you think you have everything tuned up properly to test is a recipe for disaster: You may not realize you’ve made incompatible changes until it’s too late or too difficult to figure out where you went wrong.

  1. Choose a CMS that simplifies the design cycle

Traditional design cycles take many forms and often represent significant time and cost burdens. For example, imagine you told your designer that you want to implement a new feature. After coming up with visuals, relevant layout elements, or CSS styles, they could hand off their work to a coder who would implement the underlying HTML, JavaScript, or data services that connected to the backend server.

It’s pretty clear to see how this strategy opens the floodgates to potential problems. Each added step takes more time. As with a game of telephone, more complexity adds to the confusion. Once you’ve pitched an idea and it’s passed through a bunch of other people, the chances of you ending up with something that hits as intended become increasingly slimmer.

  1. Work gradually

  • Dividing the work among a group of talented collaborators is a good start, but not if you’re overburdening your team members. While choosing a good CMS definitely relieves some of the burden by making it easier for each person to work efficiently, you also need to be smart about how you assign tasks and accept changes.
  • Unsurprisingly, this is another area where the world of software engineering offers some insights. Large software projects typically rely on something called version control tools that work much like your favorite text editor to keep track of changes to a document.

Conclusion

Just as it is a wise move to establish your design goals early, deciding what platform you will use to achieve them and committing to your choice can dramatically reduce the need for time-consuming modifications.