HOW SITEIMPROVE HELPS During A Website Redesign

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1 HOW SITEIMPROVE HELPS During A Website Redesign WEB GUIDE Whether it s part of a larger rebranding process, the old website simply wasn t achieving the goals set out by the business, or it just needed a new look, redesigning your website is a huge undertaking. Every department has specific needs, stakeholders have different opinions, and there will be plenty of bumps along the way. Whatever the reason, you ve decided to take the leap and we re here to help make the journey as smooth as possible.

2 GUIDE overview This report focuses on the challenges faced during a website redesign project that Siteimprove can help alleviate. This report is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to performing a website redesign, but rather, is intended to demonstrate the value and importance of implementing Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite (WGS) in the early stages of a website redesign project. This report will highlight the benefits of Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite (WGS) during the 5 major phases of a redesign project: Research Planning Development Content Population Test and Launch 2

3 TABLE of contents 1. Research Choosing the right CMS...4 Selecting the right analytics tool...4 Evaluate your hosting... 5 Implement analytics early Planning Improving navigation structure...6 Reuse or rewrite content?...6 Gathering user feedback... 7 Performing an inventory check... 7 Website policy adherence Development Spread out the debugging process...8 Optimize early...9 Web accessibility matters Content Population Finding content issues...10 Avoid last minute panic...11 Content accountability Test & Launch Performing a final quality check Removing duplicate style sheets Setting up 301 redirects Checking your privacy statement Launch with confidence

4 PHASE ONE Research Choosing the right CMS Before any website redesign can succeed, it s important to identify and understand the issues that the redesign is intended to address. Dig deeper than the common our website is outdated response and look at your current site through your visitors eyes. What problems do they encounter? Nearly all modern-day Content Management Systems (CMSs) have a suite of useful tools built in, and no two are created exactly the same. In addition to that, most CMSs can be extensively customized. So how do you know which one is best for your organization, and how it should be customized? The answer is surprisingly simple: look at the strengths and weaknesses of your current website, and choose a CMS that will minimize those weaknesses while playing to your strengths. For example, if your pages are frequently missing page titles or <h1> tags, consider a CMS setup that allows you to make these fields mandatory. Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite (WGS) identifies issues with your current setup, enabling you to make educated decisions when choosing which CMS is right for your organization. Selecting the right analytics tool When choosing an analytics tool to measure the traffic on your new website, consider the level of expertise your users have. Google Analytics is a popular free program, but its complexity and lack of customer support make it confusing for the average user. An analytics program is useless if your web team cannot or does not use it. 4

5 Choosing the right analytics tool will save you money, and countless hours in employee time and training. Siteimprove s integrated analytics tool is designed with the typical user in mind. Powerful measurement and tracking features packaged in an interface so simple, it requires an average of 30 minutes to learn. Evaluate your hosting Siteimprove Web Governance Suite constantly monitors your website s uptime and response rate from servers around the world. Reports detailing your site s performance give you the data you need to make an informed decision on whether or not your in-house hosting needs updating. Siteimprove s WGS is also useful for measuring the accuracy of an external hosting provider s performance and uptime guarantees, so you can make informed decisions about whether or not your current provider is right for your new website. Implement analytics early Regardless of which analytics tool you choose, adding it to your current website several weeks before launching the redesigned site is critical. Due to differences in the way analytics programs calculate data, each will report slightly different numbers. If you switch analytics programs when launching the new site and the numbers displayed are suddenly 7% lower than before, how will you know if this is due to differences in reporting or a problem with your new site? Running multiple analytics programs on your website is common, and poses no threat to performance. This will give you a baseline with which to gauge your new analytics results. Analytics Program 1 Analytics Program 2 5

6 PHASE TWO Planning Improving navigation structure What should receive placement on the main site navigation, homepage, or other high-visibility locations? With no solid evidence leaning one way or the other, this debate usually grinds the website planning to a halt, sometimes for months. Missed deadlines, increased cost, and frustration. Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite (WGS) helps you determine what content should be placed where, and why. What should be on the homepage and main navigation? With Siteimprove s WGS, you can track user journeys and measure how many clicks it takes your users to reach the content they want. Popular content requiring several clicks to access should be brought closer to the homepage, and information that users rarely look for should be moved further away, if not removed entirely. Siteimprove s WGS also allows you to view terms that users have been searching for to determine what information isn t visible enough. Armed with this data, you can create a logical site hierarchy based on actionable data that avoids political deadlock while optimizing your site for visitors. Remove or rewrite content? Rewriting content is a difficult and time consuming endeavor, but often a necessary expense. So how do you know which content to transfer over to the new site, and which to leave behind? With Siteimprove s WGS you can identify pages that get clicks, but have a high bounce rate, which may indicate that your visitors are interested in the content, but that it doesn t meet their needs. In which case, you may want to consider rewriting. 6

7 Unlike most other analytics programs, Siteimprove s WGS can also identify the pages with the lowest number of views, giving you a comprehensive list of pages you may no longer need; saving you time and resources carrying that content over. Gathering user feedback Siteimprove s WGS allows you to gather direct feedback from your website visitors. This makes it easy for you to immediately see ratings and comments on your most popular pages, pages with high bounce rates, or any other pages you would like to improve. This enables you to make changes to your website based on user feedback and enhance your user experience right away. Performing an inventory check Use Siteimprove s WGS to create exportable lists of your site s media files, documents, cookies, phone numbers, addresses and more. This can save you countless hours of searching through your site and ensure that nothing is missed when transferring to the new site. This also provides you with an opportunity to audit your media files and content for outdated information that may need to be updated or removed. Siteimprove s WGS features a PDF Checker that scans your site s PDFs for broken links and misspellings, and alerts you to any potential errors. Website policy adherence Failing to follow web policies is the fastest way to turn a beautiful new website into a mess. So how do you ensure that the new web policies will be adhered to? Most common policy violations: The best method is to take a look at your current policy violations, and determine why they happened. If the document outlining policies and guidelines for publishing to your current website are obsolete or nonexistent, then your content contributors are likely to use whatever styles seem best to them in the moment. This Wild West approach, where everyone does as they please, can make any website seem stodgy and outdated. If this root problem isn t properly addressed, your new website will soon begin to look like your existing site. Siteimprove s WGS allows you to see an overview of the content on your website, so you can determine which elements of your web policy are being ignored, so you can adjust accordingly. Broken links Misspellings Missing page titles Missing <h1> tags Oversized images 7

8 PHASE THREE Development Spread out the debugging process Establishing a debugging process from the beginning ensures a smoother launch by spreading out the revision work, giving you more time to fix problems. This will also save significant amounts of time by catching issues with templates before they spread to every page on your site. During development, websites undergo countless revisions and changes, often causing links and images to break. These may go unnoticed, and can find their way into thousands of pages as the site develops. Avoiding mistakes entirely is unrealistic, so catching and correcting them quickly is critical to a smooth development process. Web accessibility matters The development phase is also the best time to ensure that all your page templates meet accessibility requirements. This will optimize your site for all visitors (especially those with disabilities), increase search engine visibility, and prevent lawsuits. 1 in 5 adults now live with a disability 1. This includes visual impairments such as dyslexia and color-blindness, hearing impairments, cognitive disorders, and physical disabilities. The range and severity of these disabilities are as varied as the people affected by them. Many of these users rely on assistive technologies, like screen readers, to navigate the web. For them, even the most common website interactions can be frustrating, difficult experiences if the site hasn t been built properly or with accessibility in mind. Websites that don t meet modern accessibility standards risk alienating 20% of their potential audience

9 Siteimprove s WGS Accessibility tool will analyze your site for WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 web accessibility compliance. This will allow you to easily test for, and correct, accessibility issues before you add thousands of pages of content that may be affected by subsequent changes to the templates. Optimize content early Implementing Siteimprove s WGS during the development phase will allow you to optimize your site for both people and search engines, helping to ensure that your new site performs well in online searches. If your organization uses its website as a major marketing or communication tool, even a single week of poor search engine results can have catastrophic effects on your long-term goals. Broken Links Misspellings Missing Page Titles Missing <h1> tags Oversized images Old website Development Phase Test Phase 9

10 PHASE FOUR Population Finding content issues As content is being added, edited, and removed, there is a great risk of creating problems. Often, hurried content contributors will use URL s on the current website that link to pages and images, intending for the link to be temporary, but then forget to relink upon completion of the redesign. During development these links may work perfectly, but then suddenly break upon the launch of the site. Worse yet, they may link to images hosted on a different website entirely, opening liability to copyright claims as well as broken images in the event that the picture is taken down or moved on the external site. Another common mistake is uploading large images at full resolution to be resized in the browser, which slows the page load time considerably - especially on mobile devices. The picture may look perfectly normal, but this will turn visitors into bounces, as visitors are easily frustrated with slow load times. Remember to format your images before uploading them to save hassles and headaches. Siteimprove s WGS identifies broken links, as well as links at risk of breaking upon launch. Contributors are especially prone to submitting platform-specific documents during the population phase. Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents are the most common examples, and are often the most problematic. Today, more than 24% of all computers with Microsoft Office installed use an outdated version, and would not be able to open a document created in a Microsoft Office 2010 program

11 Avoid last-minute panic As large amounts of content are being added to your website, issues such as spelling errors, broken links, and missing files will inevitably pile up. Waiting until a few days before launch creates unnecessary stress for all parties involved, and strongly increases the likelihood that damaging mistakes will slip through the cracks. Deploying Siteimprove s WGS during the population phase will allow you to correct issues as you go, spreading the workload over a much more manageable period of time. This also gives you the ability to make any necessary adjustments to guidelines and processes to minimize production issues. Launching with Siteimprove WGS: 3 Broken links? No problem! Content accountability When many contributors are adding content simultaneously, it becomes difficult to keep track of the information on your site, and who s responsible for it. When a mistake is found, who should fix it? Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite gives you an overview of your entire website, allowing you to delegate responsibilities and send automated reports to each content contributor for the sections of the website under their responsibility. Our Content Policy tool allows you to flag single words, numbers, and phrases up to 500 characters in order to ensure content consistency. By enabling you to identify brand specific language, industry terminology, and legal or regulatory disclaimers, Siteimprove s WGS makes it easy to quickly identify the pages where new content needs to be added and unwanted content needs to be removed. Launching without Siteimprove WGS: Cross your fingers. Here goes nothing! 11

12 PHASE FIVE Test & Launch Performing a final quality check If ongoing quality checks have been performed during the development and population phases, pre-launch testing should be much less stressful. Use Siteimprove s Web Governance Suite to perform a final check for: Broken links Links to the current website Misspellings Accessibility issues SEO issues Removing duplicate stylesheets In addition to re-checking for these issues, you can run a final development check to ensure that no pages are linked to old style sheets. Often times during this stage, pages are still linked to development copies of a stylesheet, which may be identical to the correct stylesheet, and therefore very difficult to find manually. However, if a change is made in the future to the main stylesheet, it will not update across the entire site unless all development copies of the CSS file have been removed. You can also use Siteimprove s WGS to find any remaining Lorem Ipsum placeholder text that may have been forgotten during template development. Setting up 301 redirects Chances are, you have put a lot of time and resources into your current website s SEO. Protect that investment by redirecting traffic from your old website to your new one. This will allow you to retain your site traffic and search engine rankings. However, setting up redirects for every page is far too lengthy a process for larger websites because each page must be manually redirected. 12

13 With Siteimprove s WGS you can identify the pages with the most traffic from external sources, to create a list of the most important pages to redirect. Checking your privacy statement Making sure that your organization s privacy statement is properly accessible on every page is one of the best ways to avoid misunderstandings. Sometimes the link to the privacy statement in the footer of a web page can break, leaving your organization open to litigation. Use Siteimprove s WGS to make sure that the footer on every page has the correct link to your privacy statement and prevent costly mistakes. Launch with confidence Once you have finished these final checks, you can launch with confidence and peace of mind. To learn how Siteimprove can help you better manage and maintain your website, please visit us at Siteimprove.com Launch with confidence & peace of mind 13

14 GET a free DEMO go.siteimprove.com/demo Who is Siteimprove? Siteimprove is the only web governance software that helps you better manage and maintain your website through quality assurance, accessibility, web analytics, SEO, and response all in one tool. siteimprove.com EBVVFFNA1214