Planning Ahead for an Effective Redesign

Sometime in the future, you are going to have to update that web site. You started small, built it yourself or had a friend do it and as you’ve learned more, you’ve tweaked it, optimized it, made little improvements here and there, and generally held things together.

Ultimately, a re-design will be necessary, especially for growth. Reasons for redesigning a site are numerous; to bring in a fresh or a more professional look, to add an online catalog or content management system, or to revise the structure to market, or track ROI, more effectively. In any case, there is going to be change and it is always a good idea to plan a strategy for growth.

The largest obstacle most sites face is moving from a static HTML site to more flexible dynamic programming, allowing the addition of a catalog or content management system. Converting to a dynamic site entails some changes that need planned in order to maintain traffic levels and ideally, your existing rankings.

Stage 1- Gather Information

In the first stage of planning a redesign, the goal is to find the most popular pages of your existing site:

• Which are the top entry pages?
• Which pages have the most rankings?
• Which pages do your site visitors view most often?

You can find this information in your web logs, using a statistics analysis program to find the specifics. Answering these questions will help you design your new site while maintaining the success of the older site, and you may uncover some necessary improvements in the navigation and user preferences.

Stage 2- Target Audience Identification

After studying your site data, the second stage of planning is to identify your design elements. Go through your customer data and learn who your customers are. Use as much demographic information as you have to build a design that caters to that general category. You want to be sure to create a design that fits the market and makes them comfortable on your site. As an example, middle age women tend to respond to different design elements than high school males – so be sure you know who your primary customer is. Missing your market in the redesign may cause you to lose customers.

Stage 3- Link Analysis

The third stage of planning is identifying any deep links into your site. Deep links are links from other web sites to any page beyond the homepage, such as a product information page. By now, you should know if the page names and page extensions will be changing, especially if you are moving to a dynamic site. Once you know of any deep links, plan to contact the sites that are linking to you and make them aware of the new pages. You will need those links to reflect the new page name as soon as possible to maintain your rankings. You can also use your link discovery information to market your new site to those who are linking to you, as they are most likely interested in your products or information.

Redirecting the Old Pages

If you have access to a programmer who understands redirects, you may want to retain their services. If your site is moving to a dynamic platform, such as PHP, a programmer may be able to help you maintain the associations from the old page name to the new page name. This can be done through a re-write or a redirect of the URL. For example;

If the page www.example.com/product/furrybunny.html will change to www.example.com/cat.php?id=4, you may need a redirect to change any requests for the old page to the new dynamic page.

However, a rewrite can help maintain the old page name to the new page name, or to eliminate the dynamic “?” and “=” characters . A mod-rewrite in Apache (Linux server) can also create a URL that looks like this: www.example.com/products/furrybunny.php. Tweaked even more, a site written in PHP with a mod-rewrite and some server tweaking can create a URL just like the old page URL, with an extension of .html instead of .php. This way, you don’t have to worry about chasing deep links, or losing traffic as the page associations and page names have remained the same.

If you don’t have access to a programmer to make modifications, here is a simple list to follow:

1. Study your statistics to find popular pages
2. Look for high rankings keywords and their pages
3. Look for top-converting keywords and their pages
4. Identify your target audience from sales and leads already gained from the site
5. Design for your strongest market.
6. Identify who is linking to you and get the links changed when the page names change.

Finally, create a custom error page. Usually called a Custom 404 Error page, these pages are loaded when a visitor clicks on an old link or mis-types a URL to your site. Instead of seeing the generic “Page not Found” message, your site’s branding and message can be shown, keeping the visitor on your site. Effectively using a custom error page can drive customers back into your site by providing links back into the major areas of your site.

These are important steps to consider when you set out to plan a redesign. Don’t just think about the new colors and graphics, be aware of how the new page structure will impact your search rankings, bookmarks, and inbound links. There are many ways to overcome problems, and the goal is to plan for any problems in advance.