3 Must-Ask Questions Before Starting Your Website Redesign

Anyone who has ever spearheaded a website redesign project knows how challenging it can be. An especially demanding part of the process is managing stakeholders, sometimes too many, and acknowledging their individual sense of ownership of the website.  Despite the difficulties, with proper preparation, the successful guidance of a web project to completion can be achieved.

Ask The Right Questions

Asking some basic, but very important questions at the outset of the project is key to a successful launch. These questions typically align with the process methodology for a website design, so addressing them up front helps clarify the project and drive design and development decisions.

Question #1: What are the business goals of your website?

Defining your business goals and assigning measurable metrics for the project help focus the design process and eliminate organizational politics. Identify five or six project goals, each honing in on a specific area of focus and attached to a quantifiable measure. When these goals have been outlined and accepted, decisions about the website can be made and measured against them, ultimately providing a clear and concrete strategic direction.

Question #2: Who is the primary audience for your website?

Once you have identified you primary audience, you’ll want to do user research to determine the unique needs of your user group. Your research should be conducted with people who fit the specific profile of your users in order to understand which content, features, and design they find most motivating. Presenting your research findings to stakeholders is an important step toward creating a consensus around the design and content for the website. It clearly demonstrates how the stakeholder’s perceptions of what users what differ from the actual needs of the user. The research is key to:

• Providing a clear, actionable, and unified directive for the project
• Opening up a dialog about how to effectively reach the primary audience based on their needs.

Question #3: Who will be the website gatekeeper after launch?

Outlining a plan for ongoing website governance before the project even gets started is important for creating ownership and workflow within your organization. Depending on the type of organization, ownership of the website can fall to a number of different groups – marketing, IT, or other internal departments. Defining a governance plan early on helps to involve the right people in the project and make them feel that they are partners.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Keep in mind that one of the most valuable actions a web project manager can take is to communicate the complexity of a website redesign effort to stakeholders. People who have never built a website tend to assume that it is easy to create, develop, and launch one, however demonstrating all of the thought, decisions, choices, and consideration that is required helps people to understand the true complexity of the project.

Above all, when it comes to a successful launch of a website redesign, making as many decisions about strategic direction as possible up front will help put you on the right path.