Perhaps you feel your legal website is just kind of…sitting there. While it is not necessarily a failure, it simply appears to be languishing in cyberspace so you think a total redesign is in order. Before you jump in to tear apart a lackluster design, think about the fact that a major overhaul can be a dangerous—and less than productive—strategy. Generally speaking, people don’t like change and it takes a while for them to adapt to a new environment. The better strategy could be to make it a point to engage in continuous improvement of the tasks your customer’s engage in the most on your site. Many site owners seem to have an obsession with website redesign, and while some of them can result in a better site, many times the redesign is simply done for the wrong reasons.
Design Only When There is a Valid Reason
If there is a genuine reason for a major overhaul such as the fact that the old structure simply is not working, then go ahead and redesign—if not, think about it a bit longer and try to sit down and determine what part of the site is not working and why. Most organizations would rather spend $50,000 on a single overhaul project than to spend $5,000 per year to continuously improve their site. While this sounds counter-intuitive, remember that organizations—and the human beings who make up those organizations—love to measure and a single project is much more measurable than a series of improvements. A large redesign probably also comes with a large budget, has a beginning and an end, making it easy to measure results.
Redesign is More Fun!
In other instances, a redesign is chosen over improvements simply because it’s more fun. Let’s face it—constant updating and implementing improvements is pretty much sheer drudgery. All those changes can seem small and trivial and it can feel as though you are simply spinning your wheels. Nonetheless there are valid reasons to choose continuous improvement over total redesign. The world is a huge, complex place and it is virtually impossible to ensure that within one huge design, everything is absolutely perfect. It’s much better to change in small increments, then test the results. Test your headings, test your links, test your images at a larger size vs. a smaller one, test your navigation and test the strength of your content. Prior to the Web it was incredibly difficult to determine how people reacted to content. The Web allows us to observe how our content causes people to behave and to react.
Avoiding an SEO Crisis During a Redesign
Finally, it can be difficult to avoid an SEO disaster during a major website redesign, losing the rankings and organic search traffic you’ve worked so hard to obtain. When you redesign your website there’s a good chance the URL’s will change and if they change you have to let the search engines know where the older URL’s have moved to. If you don’t, your hard-won SEO is going to vanish into thin air, leading to a drop in your PageRank, drops in organic search traffic, drops in readers and a drop in conversions. If you can possibly keep the same URL structure that your original website had, by all means, do so as your life will be much, much easier. Should you decide that a total redesign is absolutely necessary, make sure to review your current optimization before the redesign, making sure the new pages contain the same optimization. Baby steps are almost always than a big leap into the unknown, so if possible get over your dislike of improvement and give it a whirl before you decide on a large redesign.
