Dont Blow Your Next Redesign
Many of us at one point or another have done a redesign and seen the page rank drop, the conversions dwindle or the audience disappear. Most commonly a redesign turns ugly because of something we have simply overlooked like forgetting a sitemap, or 301 redirects. Below are the top three reasons why a redesign project can go south and how to avoid them. If you need any printing services try full color commercial printing at PsPrint.com
1. No Planning
On many redesign projects, the client wants the site done yesterday, so in haste it’s easy to immediately jump into designing and coding. However the client most likely hired you because their current website isn’t performing well, so you should figure out why (although it’s entirely possible they just want something new and shiny).
Before starting any web redesign project it’s always important to have a plan and analyze the current site. Your first priority is to figure out how their site ranks on all the major search engines, what are the most common landing/exit pages and how users navigate the site.
With this information in hand it’s possible to move forward and layout the site, figure out which content to keep and which keywords to target.
2. No SEO from the get go
A web redesign project and search engine optimization should go hand in hand. SEO however is something that can also be easily overlooked and often is. Below is a bare minimum list of SEO practices for a redesign.
- Keep a clear and logical site structure.
- Make the url’s descriptive and free of parameters
- Identify keywords and find common search phrases
- Optimize each pages meta data and titles
- Use unique content that is relevant to the page and its title
- Use standards compliant (X)HTML
- Submit XML sitemaps to all major search engines.
If all of these basic points are accomplished, you should keep or increase your current search engine standings and make the site much more usable.
3. Not redirecting old pages to new ones
This is an absolute must when doing a redesign, especially if you have changed the sites structure and filenames. This is also very easy to overlook so I recommend as soon as you have a sitemap of the new site construct a .htaccess file.
Redirecting the old site to the new one is not a difficult task and below is the code for .htaccess to accomplish this task.
To Redirect a certain page:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html
To Redirect Entire Site:
Redirect 301 / http://www.new-site.com/
While it’s near impossible to work out all the bugs in a site before goes live, if you’ve done everything stated above you can take comfort in knowing that people looking for what your client offers will continue to be able to easily find it in the search engines and the sites PR won’t nose-dive. And finally at the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling you get of launching a new website (relief).
Stefan is a web designer and developer on Cape Cod. He spend his days focusing on creating clean website designs, open source development, and SEO. He also considers himself to be a web standards and accessibility evangelist.
21 Responses to “Dont Blow Your Next Redesign”
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Great points Stefan, thanks for sharing.
Good ideas here. Needed this.
Thanks Ben
Awesome descriptive post. You really managed to hit the nail on the head here.
A lot of people think redesigns can just go forth. There is much more to it
Thank you everyone for the comments, this is my first post on Pixel Clouds so there all very appreciated.
Great article, it gave me some good tips for future redesigns of my own blog!
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Of course. Just take a snippet though. Cheers
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