A new website can transform how customers see your business, but a redesign is also one of the bigger investments a marketing team makes. Before you speak to an agency or open a design tool, it is worth pausing to answer a few simple questions. They will save you time, keep the budget under control and make sure the finished site solves real problems.
We use these questions at the start of every project. They are short, but the answers shape everything that follows, from the sitemap to the tone of the copy.
A redesign should start with your customers, not with colours and fonts. Find out what they need first.
The first question is simple: what is not working today? Look at your analytics, talk to your sales and support teams and collect the complaints you hear most often. Maybe visitors cannot find pricing, maybe the site is slow on mobile, maybe the content no longer matches what you sell. Write each problem down in plain language. The second question is who the site is for. List your main audiences and the one thing each of them needs to do on the site. When the list is clear, it becomes much easier to decide what stays, what goes and what needs to be built from scratch.
Define success before you start.
The third question is how you will measure success. Choose a small number of goals, such as more contact requests, higher newsletter sign-ups or fewer support calls, and record where they stand today. Without this baseline you cannot prove the new design performs better. The fourth question is who will look after the site once it is live. A beautiful website quickly loses value if nobody updates the content, so decide early who owns each section and make sure the new system is easy for them to use. Training and simple editing tools matter just as much as the design itself, and they are far cheaper to plan now than to add later.
Plan for the long term, not just launch day.
The fifth and final question is what happens after launch. A website is never finished: search engines change, your products evolve and customers expect fresh content. Set aside time and budget for regular improvements, review your goals every quarter and keep a list of ideas for the next phase. Teams that treat their site as a living product get far more value from it than teams that redesign every few years and then leave it untouched.
If you can answer these five questions with confidence, you are ready to brief an agency and start the redesign on solid ground.
6 Comments
Georgia Reader
Great checklist. We skipped question three on our last redesign and paid for it later with months of extra fixes. Sharing this with the rest of our marketing team today.
Aron Alvarado
Useful article. Do you have a template for the stakeholder interviews you mention?
Lynda Small
Not the author, but we used a very similar process last year. We interviewed twelve people across sales, support and management and asked each of them the same five questions. The overlap in their answers was surprising and gave us a clear brief in less than a week. The key is to keep the interviews short, write everything down and share a one-page summary with everyone afterwards so they can see their input reflected in the plan. It also helped us spot conflicting priorities early, before any design work started, which saved a lot of time and budget later in the project.
Sianna Ramsay
Thanks Lynda, that is really helpful. A one-page summary is a great idea: it keeps everyone aligned and makes it much easier to get sign-off from management before the project begins.
Nolan Davidson
We are planning a redesign for next spring and this came at the perfect time. The point about measuring the current site before changing anything is often ignored. Without a baseline you cannot prove the new design performs better, and it becomes much harder to justify the budget for the next phase.
Kay Duggan
Clear and practical, as always. I would add one more question: who will maintain the content once the new site is live?