A website redesign is not easy. Expectations are high. The old site is cranky, tired and outdated. And you wanted the new one live yesterday. Three more months of development feels like forever. Sound familiar?
At GreenPath, we felt all of that. We had just made a strategic pivot toward a holistic approach to financial wellness, led by our CEO. We were eager to deliver on our “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” to remix the American dream so that it works for everyone.
As is the case for many organizations, our website is a critical piece of the marketing mix. It is the primary lead generator and a key influencer in decision making for clients and partners. Getting it right was essential to our organization’s overall success.
That was why, when I learned about the website on my third day as GreenPath’s first chief marketing officer, I hit “pause.” Six months into the project, and two weeks before the scheduled launch, my instincts told me the site just wasn’t ready. Slowing down was absolutely the right decision. For those of you starting on a similar project, I offer some key learnings from my experience.
Know The Value Of What You Already Have
Look at how your website performs as a whole. Analytics will tell you how much your content is being used, but it’s not the whole story. How did people find you in the first place? A search engine optimization (SEO) audit can help you figure out how your audience is getting to your site and enable you to make it easier for them to find your new site.
One of my first steps was to engage an independent SEO auditor to compare the new site and the old one. We learned that our existing site performed quite well in search engines. If we had we launched a new site without the SEO audit, we would have damaged our search engine ranking, making it harder for people to find us.
As a result of our audit, we migrated hundreds of pages that were once marked for deletion. Even though those pages didn’t get much traffic, they were helping our search engine ranking. That content is still an important part of who we are and the help we provide to 200,000+ people every year.
Put People At The Center
There really is no substitute for learning how people use your website (hint: It might be quite a bit different than you think!).
User testing will help you find out where your design needs tweaking. For instance, we learned that our website navigation needed to be reorganized, and the tools that bring people in the door were buried and frustrating to find. As a result, we overhauled our information architecture and reorganized large sections of content.
Assemble An All-Star Team
Experts will prepare you for a drop in site traffic when you launch a redesigned site while people and search engines “relearn” your site. This is normal! But for GreenPath, that drop never happened. Since the launch, we have seen a steady upward trend in website performance.
How can you do the same? I credit our team of internal and external partners who kept each other accountable and did the often-tedious work:
• Lead the project with a blend of project management, marketing/communications and technical expertise. Our project leader had a writing and digital communications background, and she has shepherded hundreds of websites to completion. Her ability to collaborate with our developers, designers and internal team made success possible.
• Bring specialty skills to the team through strong agency partners. While a part of the team for only a short time, our SEO partner, Pure Visibility, provided game-changing information that steadied our course and allowed us to maintain our superior search engine ranking.
• Involve key stakeholders. Having representatives of the end-user audience is a must. Our project would have benefited from user testing earlier in the process, but even at the end, user feedback ultimately altered the user experience.
• Engage detail-oriented implementers with the patience and skill to get to the finish line. After we digested the SEO audit, my team culled through the large body of content that had not made the original cut. Page by page, they edited and added content. My digital marketing manager optimized every single page to ensure key terms were included. It was months of attention to detail and enabled a successful launch.
• Bring in an IT business partner. Websites have a lot of technical nitty-gritty, and having a resource to fill out your team’s technical knowledge is extremely valuable. Partway through our project, our new CIO introduced the concept of IT business partners. Having a dedicated tech expert enabled us to make strategic decisions, save money and maximize our relationship with our specialty agency partners.
Celebrate And Learn
At the end of such a big project, a celebration is in order — and it’s the best time to learn from your whole team. A debrief exercise to investigate what went well and how you could improve is a great step to strengthen relationships and identify priorities for the next round. We used this positive framework for our debrief and ultimately learned what didn’t work, without the blame game. It brought forth important learnings and gave everybody knowledge, insight and perspective for future projects.
If you’re anything like us, your redesign is just the beginning. As pleased as we are with the site, we are motivated to continue delivering great experiences to support our clients’ and partners’ needs.