About to Redesign Your Website? Read this before you do.

A website design may be done for a number of reasons; the old design is tired, customers are complaining about aspects of the site, or new functionality is required. Often a change in website design is also accompanied with a change in technology such as moving to a content management system.

One way or another, changing from the earlier web design to the new can be fraught with danger if you are not careful.

Here are the top two key issues that you should watch out for:

• Not fully understanding what worked before you made the design changes, and
• Impacts on your search engine rankings.
  

What works about your current design.

If you make substantial changes to your website design, content and structure, you may risk breaking a system that already works well. Before you implement a new design you should study how visitors are currently using the site, what they are doing and what has been achieved.

The comment that we hear time and time again goes along the lines of "well our site is SO bad we just have to redesign it NOW and we don't have time for this type of analysis".

I strongly disagree. Sure the CEO may hate the old design, it may appear dated and tardy and yes the navigation may be horrendous, but if you change the site without at least taking a quick look at what visitors are doing then the risks of getting it even more wrong are very high. Equally if you don't understand what is working now, how can you measure the improvements that were made and justify the investment in a new design?

At the very least you should implement a web analytics tool at least 1 month prior to the start of the redesign process and look for the following:

• Where visitors enter the site; this is important to ensure that existing links and search engine rankings don't get broken (see the next section for more details)
• The number of visitors who achieve one or more goals on the site. A goal can be a specific page that you want a visitor to see, a registration, contact request, sale, etc
• How long visitors spend on the site and how many pages they view. See the accompanying article "How to interpret time on site" for further details.
  

A more detailed analysis will look at what content visitors look at on the site and how they move to and from key pages such as a contact page or into the sales process.

Around a month after the redesign you then perform the same analysis and look for the gains that have been made.

Panalysis can undertake this type of analysis on your behalf. Please contact us for further details.

Impacts on your search engine rankings, links and bookmarks

If your new website design is going to have different file names then you need to plan carefully for the implementation phase. E.g www.somesite.com/about.html becomes www.somesite.com/index.asp?page=1

You need to check this with your web developers early in the redesign process as it has substantial impacts on your site.

The key problems with changing the file names on the site include:

1. Existing bookmarks and links to the website will break
2. Search engines take a long time to refresh their index and your site will have lots of broken pages in the search results.
3. Search engines such as Google use links to and from web pages to rank these pages.

Effects:

Broken Pages
Search engines will return links to broken pages for a period of time. Visitors may click on these links and get a missing page error on your site. The search engine index will be updated at some point in the future which will remove this error.

Other websites may also link to the page and any clicks from these sites will result in a broken page as well. These sites are less likely to update their links and this may result in permanently broken page views from this site.

Lost Rankings
Once the search engines have updated their index each of the new file names will start with a zero score and this is highly likely to impact on the search engine rankings for these pages. With Google it can take many months or even a year or so for the index to fully assign the Rank to a new page. Additionally where another website is linking to the now broken page, the value that Google assigns to this extra link will be wasted.

Required Action
The best option is to use the same URL naming convention. This is not always possible of course so here are a few other options:

1. Permanently redirect all URLs from the old address to the new address on the server using a 301 redirection. This can be done in web servers like Apache and IIS.
2. Use the URL Rewrite module in Apache to retain the old URLs and map these to new URLs. This is subtly different to the option above as it retains the old address and doesn't redirect the visitor to the new location but pretends that the old page still exists.
3. Have a custom error page with links to the key sections of the site. The purpose of this page is to capture any other clicks that result in an actual error and present a useful page that tells the visitor where they can find the new content.
4. Set up your web analytics tool to monitor the error page. Check on the referring pages to this error page to determine where visitors are coming from when they see this page. This can be done in most analytics tools including Google Analytics.
   

For advice on how to implement any of this, please contact Panalysis.

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