Internal pressure

Internal pressure is probably the most common driver of website redesigns. In a company of any substantial size, there is a network of people who influence the web presence, from the CEO and director of marketing at the top, down to the creative director, production-level web designers, and content creators. All of them have good ideas, and all of them want to be heard. Within that collective of influencers, the business probably has one key figure that pulls the trigger on any major website decisions, and they spend a good part of their tenure bracing against a constant gale of suggestions. It’s inevitable that one of these suggestions will be the catalyst for a redesign.

Many changes will be visually driven. One of the penalties of operating in a globalized economy is the pressure to constantly cycle through creative ideas, to stay fresh with branding and reinvent the look and feel of your business in order to remain relevant. Sometimes these changes are subtle (maybe a new tagline or an expanded media initiative), and sometimes the changes are huge (massive branding campaigns, a logo redesign, or a new set of core messages). It’s the designer’s job to make sure those changes are reflected in the corporate website.

New products or services can also be the genesis for redesigning the website. This is especially relevant to smaller businesses, although larger companies have been known to upheave their web presence in order to back a new product.

Shiny new technology

There is a certain level of nerdiness all web designers possess. In order to succeed in the industry, it is their responsibility to have their finger on the pulse of the development world, and to forecast the influence of new technologies before they render their current techniques obsolete. No web designer wants their director of marketing (whose job has nothing to do with following web development technology trends) asking about a technology they’ve never heard of.

One of the true thrills of building websites is digging deep into the vast toolbox of technologies and techniques. Since the Web as a medium is constantly refreshing, old tools are being refined and new toys regularly land in the laps of savvy developers:

1. New CSS techniques
2. Search engine optimization tips
3. JavaScript widgets and frameworks
4. Upgrades to Flash
5. Usability studies
6. Accessibility techniques

Server-side languages

1. Updates to content management systems
2. Groundbreaking books on web design, like this one

Sometimes the arrival of a significant new technology can single-handedly drive a redesign. When CSS-based design went mainstream in the early 2000s, thousands of designers immediately saw the benefit of removing presentational markup, and overhauled website code bases to take advantage of this blossoming technology. Similarly, every new version of Flash upgrades the end-user’s experience, from increased usability and accessibility to ever more complex interactive environments.

The branding mind-meld

The increasing number of high-profile mergers and acquisitions is another piece of globalization fallout. The world market is becoming smaller as major competitors devour one another like sharks in a fishing pond. If nothing else, the constant business activity keeps web designers in business as companies constantly find themselves needing to rebuild or reinvent their websites in order to accommodate the influx of technology and branding clout.

This is a very situational redesign. When a company swallows another one whole, like Oracle did with PeopleSoft in December of 2005, little can be done to stop the identity from being assimilated. However, in the case of Sprint and Nextel, the merger blended the two identities to create a unified public face and eventually a whole new website highlighting the dual offerings under one domain, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Primary objectives

Primary objectives are the big targets, the mountains in the path of the river. These are the core driving factors of the redesign, and as stated previously, should be clearly and objectively measurable. You may very well have only one primary goal, such as making your site Section 508 compliant because you do business with the United States government. On the other hand, you may want to accomplish several core objectives in the redesign. Consider the following wish list for a fictional redesign:

1. Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.
2. Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.
3. Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 guidelines.
4. Add the new company logo and implement the revised style guide for corporate colors.
5. Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus with a collective drop-down menu.
6. Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.
7. Use Ajax widgets to improve the interactivity of the shopping cart process.
8. Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.

While these are all good objectives, tagging each one as a critical, red-alert, priority-one intention simply dilutes the resources for the core, must-meet goals. Budget, time, and technology constraints might force a team of designers and developers to distill the list down to only two or three.

These few top-level goals are unique to every situation, and only the web developer and his marketing team would be able to accurately rank the preceding list. For instance, it may be critical to get more customers to finish the sales process, so the sixth item might be most important. In addition, the first objective directly contributes to the second, third, and potentially fourth and fifth, so that would also be the primary objective. After consideration, our primary goals might look like this:

1. Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.
2. Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.

Secondary objectives

When it comes to a corporate website, there are many vested interests, and one person’s top priority is another person’s afterthought. Web developers often find themselves mediators between divided parties. Take advantage of your secondary objectives list to appease disgruntled marketing folk, because these objectives should receive attention during the redesign process, and are likely to be implemented.

Looking at our preceding list, and after huddling with different team members, we might identify secondary objectives as the following:

1. Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.
2. Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 guidelines.

By making the site standards compliant from the outset, reducing the page weight will be a given and you’ll already be halfway done with accessibility efforts, since standards compliance and accessibility overlap in quite a few areas.

3. Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus with a collective drop-down menu.

The director of marketing, for example, not being tech-savvy, may have a hard time finding his way around the site and will want to see a much improved navigation. A lead designer and information architect will also see considerable room for improvement and mark this as a very important secondary objective.

4. Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.

This is something the marketing team has been buzzing about for a while, and the redesign is the perfect opportunity to launch this new section.

Tertiary objectives

The third level of priority could also be called the “nice to have” category, or maybe the “why not, we’re already 90 percent there” category, or even the “hey wait, look what else we get for free” category. In other words, it’s the stuff that is not mission critical, or even all that important, but will make the site better if there’s time to work it in. From the preceding list, and taking suggestions from other team members, a list of tertiary or peripheral benefits might look like this:

1. Add the new company logo and implement the revised style guide for corporate colors.
2. Construct the site with valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
3. Use Ajax widgets to improve the interactivity of the shopping cart process.

Since the redesign is probably happening regardless, it’s a good time to work in the company colors to the CSS file and be done with it. Similarly, having code validate to XHTML

1.0 Strict might come with making the website standards compliant, but it’s certainly not a requirement. And as for the Ajax, that falls clearly into the “if time permits” category.

The research

First and foremost, digging in and researching the industry and technology will provide a strong background going forward. Answer the fundamental questions. What is the state of the browser market and standards compliance? What skill sets need to be acquired to complete the redesign?

The cold hard facts

What will be the tangible, measurable benefits of the redesign? These are the primary, secondary, and tertiary goals just discussed—the quantifiable benefits to the company’s bottom line, spelled out in numbers and ranked by importance. These need to be prominent and explained in plain language. Any type of inner-circle nomenclature, buzzword-laden prose, or technobabble will make as much headway with a management team as a pillow through concrete. Simple words, clear messages.

The timeline

Define the length of the redesign process, from start to finish. It’s important to spell this out in as much detail as possible, taking into account the team’s current workload, learning curves for new technology, testing phases, and whatever else is pertinent. There are two key rules in laying out the project timeline:

1. Indicate major landmarks for the process: Don’t package the redesign as one lump project; break the timeline into manageable chunks approvers can understand and measure against. Make sure each milestone can be proven with a tangible product, like a wireframe, a functional comp, or a fully operational beta.
2. Be honest about the time: Never over-promise and under-deliver; if the project will take six to eight weeks, tell the decision-makers it will take ten, and then surprise them by delivering after only seven.

The cost

The preceding page of advice can be largely ignored, since this is the page every person is going to flip to right away without reading anything else. For that reason, it needs to be meticulous, articulate, convincing, and above all, deliverable. The cost can be measured and broken down several ways:

First, and most easily quantifiable, is the outlay of cash. Does the upgrade require a new server, software upgrade, or more bandwidth? These hard costs should be itemized, grouped by relevance, and totaled.

Second, and harder to predict, are the miscellaneous costs that might arise during the process. Will there be travel costs, or will freelance help be needed to make a deadline? Build a cushion of cash into the budget to plan for the unexpected.

Third, and most difficult to gauge, is the time cost. This includes not only the number of man-hours on the project, but also downtime, meetings, other pressing projects that can inconveniently come up, and more. An agency has a definitive hourly rate to work from. For an in-house group, the cost of time can be difficult to translate to stable numbers; if in doubt, simply offer a total number of hours with a quick translation to larger metrics like days, weeks, or months.