A redesign recipe for tough times

You want to redesign that Web site, but the cash riverof 1999 is a distant memory. Here's how to manage a redesign on thecheap.

Website Redesign work has never attracted more interest. The recent boomhas ensured that most of the Web sites that are needed have alreadygone up. The end of that boom has deadened any sense of urgency amongorganisations still planning their first site. And it's a rare Web sitebuilt in the past four years that couldn't use substantial improvement.So redesign is in vogue. When Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler published anew guide to Web site project management in August, they called it "WebRedesign: Workflow that Works" - misleading, but probably a saleswinner.

Finding the resources for a redesign takes more work than it usedto, though. Increasing economic gloom and well-justified scepticismabout IT spending are squeezing site budgets. Even at the wealthiestsites, managers are having to sub-let the in-house massage facilitiesto insolvency specialists just to fund a few more fancy graphics. Howdo you redesign in times like these?

Clarify your mission. Find out what the site's organisationalsponsors expect it to do in the next year or two, and align yourredesign to that mission. Chances are that the sponsors' ambitions areboth clearer and more sober than they were way back in October 2000.
Gather your data. A redesign has one great advantage over agreenfields site: users are already visiting it. They're carrying outtransactions, leaving records in server logs, sending emails, talkingto call-centre staff, commenting to management. You can find what'sworking and what's not. You can also put reliable figures on what it'scosting. That frenzy of site-building between 1997 and 2000 was oftenjustified as necessary experimentation. Now it's time to look at theresults of the experiment, and keep looking at them.
Redesign by inches. The big, showy launch of a new design offersmaximum risk and makes a big, sudden hole in the budget. A successionof smaller changes can be managed and measured more easily, and eachsuccess will earn you the right to make the next incrementalimprovement.
Aim for provable short-term gains. For instance, work out how muchyou'd gain from site navigation improvements that led ten per cent morepeople to buy the site's most popular products or reach its mostpopular content. "The way to sell a year and a half ago was to talkabout getting a return on your investment after 12 months or 18months," reflects Netscape co-founder and current Loudcloud chairmanMarc Andreessen in a recent New York Times article on corporate Website spending. "Nowadays, the arguments have to do with cost reductionin the first month."
Test key features of your redesign against what's there now. Ifyou're promising ten per cent improvements in transaction rates, ensurethe redesign achieves that. Even a half-dozen test runs with friendsand volunteers off the street can suggest whether the new designimproves noticeably on the old.
Trial your redesign. If you can, put a version of your plannedchanges in a corner of your site and track any changes in activitythere.
Find cheap wins. When a site-wide redesign is beyond your existingbudget, adopt smaller projects which can produce demonstrable gains forminimal cost. They'll keep the momentum going within the site team andamong the site's organisational backers.
Design for maintainability. New graphics on the site every weekcosting you a packet? Try replacing them with text-only displays in anew design, and monitor the results. (Swapping text for graphics hasbeen an accepted strategy ever since IBM slashed graphics and downloadtime and simplified navigation in its 1999 redesign - a project whichallegedly helped boost sales 400 per cent.) Where you cannot give upGIFs and Flash files, consider a design which lets you automate theircreation, using a database tool like Macromedia's Generator. In mostcases, your redesign should allow just about every piece of sitecontent to be generated from a well-designed database structure, evenif it's generated merely as static HTML.

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