Web Redesign: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

When was the last time you managed the redesign of your web content? It is an endeavor that may strike fear in the heart of even the most ardent web content manager. Yet is a necessary evil. The need to update web content occurs for two reasons: some of the web content has become obsolete or your organization is migrating to a new content management system. Either way, it is good to be aware of all of your web content so you can readily make changes to improve the user experience.

How do you get started? One good way to get started is to take inventory of all of your web pages and links to external content. Then work with your web team and communications manager to refine the themes, messages and web content that will benefit your target audience.

However, be aware of the web review that may put your updates “in-committee” and sabotage your project plan. If you are limited in making progress that will impact your ability to meet certain web update milestones by a specific due date, then you may need to consider reviewing pages in smaller groups. To avoid the your web project stalling, look for signs of unusual delays such as team members holding off on making comments until everyone mutually agrees. A true, 100% concurrence from all team members may not be a realistic approach to managing web updates. However, a majority agreement is sufficient to keep your redesign moving forward.

The ugly part of the web redesign process occurs when you have volumes of data and limited space to house it online. How do you decide what web content to keep and what to archive or move offline? There are several options:

• Leverage historical data to keep highly visited content in the main view for site visitors
• Consider re-packaging content as special edition updates, seasonal promotions or use it to support new initiatives
• Remove content that is more than 5 years old and replace or update it with more current web content
• Check your images to see if they still correlate to the remaining edited web content