Is your website redesign about to fail? 5 warning signs
You invested a lot of time and effort into a website redesign, finally launched it, and you’re still getting complaints. Search engines aren’t finding your site and site visits have dropped off. Users who do find your site complain that they can’t find information or that the information is incorrect. The site looks good, but the calls to the support team haven’t gone down.
These problems don’t happen by accident. You put in a lot of time, but you’re not a website redesign expert. You did the best you could with the information you had at the time. You were tight on budget, timeline, and resources. Your boss told you, “Just launch it. Just get it out there.” Or you were given an arbitrary deadline and told to make it happen.
These variables all lead down the road to website redesign problems and failure. An expert would immediately see the problems, but you didn’t know it until you launched the website.
You could be in one of these situations:
Halfway through a project and you need to turn things around.
Tasked with fixing a new website redesign that didn’t work out.
Failed at a website redesign in the past and want to learn what went wrong.
Assigned to a new website redesign and want to avoid problems.
Below are some ways to recognize you’re going in the wrong direction with the content on your site and address them before you go further.
Warning Sign 1: You haven’t talked to users
Often a redesign will start with an internal initiative where executives and department heads give input on what they want the website to do. But there’s no user research and as you move further into the project, the lack is becoming a widening gap. You have a lot of assumptions about the users, few concrete details, and stakeholders are starting to argue over what they think is best. Departments are competing with each other, there’s no tiebreaker, and your timeline is slipping.
Sometimes my clients come to me in this exact situation. Instead of continuing forward, they realize they need to pause the project and get more input from their users. For a website redesign, you need more research on what external users are doing. For an intranet, you need more context from employees.
You must be willing to do this research. “Willing” means a few things.
You’ll need to pay someone to do the research and analysis as well as recruit and compensate users. If you’re researching with employees, these employees need to have time to participate in research.
User research will delay a project by at least 3 months. It takes time for someone to figure out what to research, set up the research plan, recruit users, do the research, do the analysis, then report out. Recruiting and scheduling users can take weeks.
Some companies don’t want to hear feedback. It’s important to be realistic about your appetite to hear things that may be unpleasant. The findings won’t be personal attacks, but it will critique things that coworkers have put a lot of effort into. People may get upset.
Let your user research findings inform your future decisions. If you’re not going to change course or design based on the findings, then there’s no point of doing the research. Don’t waste your time and money.
If you do the research, you will get your return on investment. Your site will be centred around users, not around your internal workings. It will be written in user-centred language. It will be structured according to user expectations.
There are a lot of statistics available on how user research will help with ROI. It’s worth reviewing them to see which statistics speak to you. (1, 2, 3)
Key Pointe does user research and stakeholder interviews as our starting point of every project.
Warning Sign 2: You haven’t done a content audit
Many website or intranet redesigns start with new technology. Estimates are focused around implementing the new CMS, completing the visual design and layout, and launching. Content falls by the wayside and, in fact, coworkers say they want to start fresh with the content. There’s no point in carrying forward the old content because it’s deemed as “bad.” Doing a content audit is pointless because you’ll be starting from scratch.
But not everything needs to be thrown out. Your company has spent a lot of time creating the existing content. Maybe it’s not focused on the audiences, but some of it should still be accurate or performing well. Accurate content can be rewritten to be audience-focused.
Without a content audit, you won’t know what's performing, what's outdated, what's duplicated, or what's quietly driving traffic to your site. Without a content audit, you’ll force content into newly created templates. You’ll find that you don’t have the right content components, templates, or certain metadata and taxonomy.
A content audit can answer what you should keep, remove, consolidate, rewrite, or create from scratch. Based on the analytics, you’ll also know which pages do or do not perform. You’ll be able to establish what metadata and taxonomy are needed, which templates are needed, and which on-page parts are needed for your content.
At Key Pointe, content audits tell us all the above and tell us what a company does. A content audit is essential for our redesign work.
Warning Sign 3: Your navigation reflects the org chart, not your user needs
Users arrive at a website with some kind of information need or task. It’s most likely that they don’t know how an organization is structured internally. Creating a website structure around the organizational structure inhibits users from finding answers to their questions.
Users don’t understand internal labels. On one website redesign I worked on, a client wanted users to find information on contributing power to the electrical grid. Users couldn’t find the information because the navigation label was “Acquiring Power.” While working on this project, the client told me that label was for them to buy or receive electricity from others. A label from the user perspective would be “Sell Power” or “Contribute to the Grid.”
Org structures create deep hierarchies, which are hard to navigate. In some organizations, there can be many levels of hierarchy. One team can be five levels deep in the structure. Mimicking this structure on a website can prevent users from finding information, especially if that team receives a lot of customer inquiries (such as the Support team or Customer Service team). This isn’t to say that a structure can’t be deep. It is to say that the structure needs to be built around user needs, not organizational hierarchy. (4)
Key Pointe provides user research and stakeholder facilitation to navigate internal conversations around website structure.
Warning Sign 4: There is no metadata and taxonomy plan
Metadata and taxonomy label your content and information so the content management system can do things with it. Many website redesigns don’t think about metadata and taxonomy until they’re putting content into the new CMS.
At this point, it’s too late. You haven’t built the templates with metadata and taxonomy, you haven’t designed the page layouts with metadata and taxonomy in mind, and you haven’t collected the data during the rewrite process.
If you want to implement the right metadata and taxonomy, you need to change the CMS development to adjust fields on the templates, to apply taxonomy terms, and to update the designs and search implementation.
Taxonomy is a way to categorize your content so it’s findable by your website admins, editors, authors, and by users. Search can surface good results and be filtered, pages can display content dynamically, and you can build some navigation off taxonomy terms.
When you don’t have a good taxonomy system, users can’t find what they need, search is incomplete and unreliable, search results have poor filtering parameters, and you’re still manually building related content links. When you don’t keep iterating on any taxonomy that you do have, or when you don’t govern it, search and filtering get even worse. (5)
Metadata and taxonomy also tell search engines, such as Google or Bing, what your content is about. Search engines and their AI tools can better interpret the results and display more valuable results to the user. You should be planning for metadata and taxonomy right after you set the content strategy and while you’re developing the new site map.
At Key Pointe, we make sure taxonomy and metadata are deliberately designed and well integrated into the website and intranet redesign.
Warning Sign 5: You're planning to migrate your existing content as-is
Migrating your content as-is is called a “lift and shift.” You pick it up from one spot and you put it down in another, same as it was before. Only it really doesn’t work that way, for a few reasons…
Users only see the front end, which is usually the content, and still can’t find or understand content.
You haven’t tested the content with users to see what does and does not work.
Metadata in one system often isn’t the same as metadata in another CMS. You still need to map between the two.
You haven’t implemented the new CMS to meet the necessary content and IA requirements.
You haven’t worked through the SEO consequences for the new site and might lose your organic and paid SEO optimization. (6)
You might think you’ll go back to fix it once the site has launched, but in my work I have rarely seen this happen. Once the new CMS is implemented and the site launches, people usually move on to the next initiative. A website redesign is seen as a capital investment, not an operational expense, and there’s no money left over for improvements.
What to do?
Information architecture and content migration shouldn’t be an afterthought. These five warning signs aren’t inevitable. They’re preventable. If they’re currently happening to you, they can be fixed. The point is to do something about it now, before your team makes more decisions that are expensive to reverse.
Key Pointe's helps you plan for content migrations so it’s not an afterthought. If your redesign is in progress or coming up and you're not sure whether you have the right foundations in place, reach out.
More reading…
Why search doesn’t work on intranets
What a Content Strategist actually does (and why you need one)