Truth be told, a lot of website processes are similar company-to-company. Obviously, some of those processes are systemized better than others, but the underlying steps are about the same. We have been building websites for twenty years, and I wanted to publicize our website revamp project plan template.
So, what goes into a website redesign? Building a new website isn’t a simple process, so I figured, why not talk about it?
The main reasons a website redesign happens
Before diving into the revamp template, we need to know why this is an essential part of your marketing strategy. This will help us define what success looks like when (a) the website is completed and (b) how it needs to grow over time.
Knowing what pain points we are solving will ensure the site we build will both continue in the areas you all have strengths in and improve the weaker areas.
Now, let’s dive into the site redesign process.
Story
Month #1
Your story is the foundation for any website redesign project and is the first part of the project plan template.
But, how do we define it? Rather than writing a novel, I figured a walkthrough of our core questions would give the most clarity on how we structure our initial discovery process:
No matter what industry you are in (or what industries you serve), knowing the answers to these questions will help shape the rest of the website redesign process.
Sitemap
Month #1
The sitemap is the structure of the story we just walked through. The pages of your website will tell the story (much like the chapters in a novel). However, before you start writing content, you need to know:
Defining your sitemap is like defining the main chapters in a book you are writing.
You want to know:
I always recommend starting with a blank slate when redesigning an existing website. I never want outdated messaging to be a distraction to the new pathway we create for a customer to work with you.
We can then map existing content pages to the new pages once the sitemap has been defined. We’ll make sure to define which content:
- Is good to keep as-is
- Needs to be re-worked (but the old URL should be redirected for maintaining SEO)
The last area we’ll focus on is defining the Key Pages of your sitemap. Not every page in a website revamp needs to have content rewritten from scratch.
We like to define 5-10 pages across the site where we are going to focus the majority of our time and effort. These pages will be the primary pages to tell your story to your customers. Before we conclude the site mapping process, we’ll “earmark” those pages to dive into during the content phase.
Wireframes
Month #1
What are wireframes?
Before we dive into what the website will actually look like, we want to ensure that we are telling the right story on each page. This is where wireframes come into play.
Many companies will go straight from building the sitemap into the design process. However, when we have done that in the past, it has posed one key challenge: When a client sees the designs for the first time, there is a lot to take in:
It’s a lot to take in, and where to start giving feedback is confusing.
Wireframes remove a lot of that chaos by only focusing on:
These are pencil sketches of how pages should be laid out. It removes all color and imagery from the design and forces everyone to focus on the core question: does this layout and general structure tell the story we agreed upon well?
What pages do we build wireframes for?
Each page will be laid out after the sitemap is completed. However, we don’t want to lay out every single page individually – that would be an immense undertaking.
We will go through the sitemap and categorize pages into a few different Layout Categories. What are these?
Layout Categories are groupings of pages on your website that will have content laid out in a very similar fashion. For example, let’s say you work with five unique industries. Each industry will have a page on your site. However, each industry’s page will not need a unique layout, in fact, most of the industry pages will be almost identical.
That is what we are trying to do. We’ll group common page layouts together so we know which pages we need to build out wireframes.
Design
Month #2
Now, we start to get into making the site come alive! We tackle the web design process a bit differently than other companies. A lot of organizations will design each page from top-to-bottom. We like to break apart our designs and focus on the elements that will make up each page.
Style guide
The first element of the style guide we work on is the basic components. These are the common elements that oftentimes get overlooked.
We want to make sure we have agreement on these very basic elements before diving in too deep.
Homepage design
We then move on to the design of the homepage, pulling inspiration from everything we’ve talked about in previous phases.
We want to ensure that our designers are aesthetically aligned with your vision before designing the rest of the site.
Component design
This is where we differ from other web design companies. We prefer not to think in “single page layouts.” Rather, we look at the site as a whole (the sitemap and wireframes we created) and ask the question: What are the common components necessary for this site that can be used across all of these pages?
We then design building blocks that can be used across any page on the website. For most marketing websites, the number of components tends to be around 12-15.
When we showcase these to you, we’re not worrying about content and page layouts. All we’re looking at is if you like the style of these components. Sometimes, that is hard to visualize when they aren’t laid out on a single page, but that’s OK. Our next step will be to put them all together.
Our developers will have everything they need to start coding your website in WordPress once we get approval on these components. They don’t care about the order of the various blocks. They need to know that the components are approved so they can start writing thousands of lines of code to make your redesigned website come to life.
Content
Months 2 & 3
Development is going on behind the scenes during content writing.
At this point, we have all of the components approved, and development has begun! We will go back to the 5-10 Key Pages we earmarked in the sitemap from earlier and mash a few things up.
We’ll take those Key Pages, the wireframes we built for those pages, and the components we just got approved and put them all together. Just like that, we’ll have page designs for all of your key pages.
One of our content writers will hop in, take the story points we talked about during the discovery process, and start filling in each of these page prototypes.
When you see these for the first time, the only thing you’ll have to think about is: do I like the content and imagery selected? We’ll have already approved the layout and all the building blocks (so you won’t have to waste any creative juices thinking about those pieces).
Prep work and launch
Month #3
The last part of our website revamp project plan template is how we prepare for the launch of the site.
Prep for the website launch
Once development has concluded, we will take all the content that was written for the Key Pages, migrate in any other content from the original website, and let you take a look at everything for the first time.
We wanted to make the prep process as easy as possible. We’ll install a button (we use Marker.io) that will float on the side of every single page of your redesigned website. When you stumble on something you’d like to be updated, just click the button. A screenshot of the website will be taken, and you’ll be able to:
Once you push Submit, all of that will be packaged up and sent over to our project management system.
Once you’re done providing notes, you can then go over to the project management system and prioritize the tickets how you’d like us to work on them.
The button will be live on the site on Monday and Tuesday. Our crew will then work on your tickets, in the order you put them in, Wednesday through Friday. We don’t care if you want us to:
- Write updated content
- Fix a small bug
- Build out a new feature
We’ll simply work through the list top-to-bottom and get through as much as we can. The following Monday, the button will be added back to the site and we’ll do the process again.
Launching the redesigned website
From our initial discovery checklist, we’ll know who holds the keys to:
We’ll work with the folks on your team to move the website from our staging server over to where it needs to be for launch. With WordPress (and WP Engine) a lot of times it is possible to do this migration with very minimal downtime. We prefer to do website launches Monday – Wednesday as that gives our team a couple of days post-launch to ensure that nothing is broken.
Summary of the website revamp project plan template
In most cases for average-sized marketing websites (20-50 pages; not too much special functionality), you’re looking at about three months to go from discovery to a new website being launched.
We also built a calculator to help you ballpark what a redesigned website would cost.