It’s very doable to plan and launch a website redesign in 30 days, but it won’t be the same as if you dedicate your time to perfecting it. A quickly built website often only focuses on the look and functionality of the site. But, inbound marketers should care about much more than that. Because so much of inbound marketing occurs on your website, a website redesign has to focus on meeting your goals and matching up with your overall strategy – and that’s going to take a little longer than merely slapping some content on a site page. Here, we’ll walk you through the steps it takes to impeccably redesign your website in 6 months.
Month 1:
- Review of Current Site - Identify the key reason for the redesign. Study and record key site metrics so you know which parts of your site are failing and, therefore, which parts to focus on during the redesign.
- Goal Setting - Once you’re aware of what’s not working, you can plan goals around what you want your new site to accomplish in the future. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-sensitive, based on the numbers you’ve reviewed.
- Buyer Personas - If you don’t already have thorough buyer persona profiles, you absolutely need them before starting a redesign project. The profiles will determine how you set up your site.
Month 2:
- Content Audit - search through all of your organization’s online content assets to determine what can be kept, what needs revising, and what needs to be cut out completely.
Month 3:
- Information Architecture - Plan for new content to fill the gaps and how all of that content will be organized. Draw out a site map. Plan what the categories will sit on your navigation bar, and what content will live under each category.
- Write Content - When you know the ultimate goal of your pages, you’re ready to write content. Take plenty of time to craft all the content that will appear on your site.
- Develop Wireframes - Before making your site look awesome figure out where exactly all of those elements will appear on the page with wireframes.
Month 4:
- Design Mock-Ups - Once the wireframes are in place, you can start adding colors, playing with fonts, and placing photos. When the design mock-ups are done, they should look almost exactly like what your site will look like on the web.
Month 5:
- Development - Now you can hand everything over to a coder.
- Determine Content Placement - Once the pages are ready to work with, the first step is to place your content. This is the time to proofread and adjust your phrasing so your messages fit.
- Finalize URLs and 301 Redirects - Enter in the new URLs on pages, and set up 301 redirects for old pages.
- SEO - On the back end of your site, add meta descriptions, add internal links, and double check that your keywords are in your URL, H1 tags, and alt text.
- Troubleshoot – Before you publish, make sure your users will have a great experience. Make sure everything is working correctly.
Month 6:
- Launch - The launch day has arrived! Publish all of your new pages, but don’t sit back and relax right away. Instead, be prepared to fix unexpected problems.
- Post-Launch:
- Generate Heat Maps - Install heat map software to learn where your visitors are clicking so you can draw hypotheses around their actions and revise accordingly so that your site is easy to navigate.
- Run A/B Testing - Set up A/B tests to determine the best long-term solution for your site.
- Experiment With User Testing - Sit down with real people and see how they use your site. Then, use those insights to revise your site.
- Review Goal Analytics - Compare new site data to old site data to get the clearest picture about what is (and isn’t) successful.
While this is the end of the timeline, your website should never really be “done.” You should optimize for conversions, add new content, and change things around as your organization changes. If you keep your long-term goals in mind, your website revisions will get you where you want to be.
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