The Essential Roles You Need For Your Website Redesign
Redesigning your website is no small undertaking…and before you get started, it’s important to make sure that you have the right people involved in the project.
Disclaimer: this rarely happens in a corproate setting.
But having the right people involved can mean the difference between a slow and painful process with a poor end result and a smooth and relatively quick project with amazing results.
Wouldn’t you prefer the latter?
So take the time up front to build the right team and sail smoothly to redesign success.
Things to consider:
Getting Outside Help
In a true redesign, the likely truth is that you are far too close to your own business and brand to be able to have an objective point of view.
Don’t get us wrong. Your info about your organization is extremely valuable…but it also means you’re too close to be the sole driver. It is important to gain an outside perspective in some way or another to make sure you are really making the most out of your redesign. Think of it as a fresh set of eyes.
And unless your entire business is web-based and you have an in-house team of branding professionals, UX experts, visual designers, developers, and marketing gurus, then we recommend working with an agency who specializes in web design and development.
You focus on what you do best (your products and services) and let your outside partner focus on what they do best – design sites for success.
But be careful who you work for. Here’s what to look for when picking an agency partner.
Determining Who Should Be Involved
Internally
The key people do be involved internally are the following:
1. Someone who knows your brand intimately, inside and out.
Ideally this is a founder, but could be any member of the company who has been there a long time and has a deep knowledge of the company and its core values.
2. Someone who knows the overall competitive strategy of the organization and understands what role the website plays in the company’s overall objectives.
This should be somebody high up in the organization with a big picture view.
3. Someone who has an in-depth understanding of your customers and their behavior.
Typically this is the head of marketing.
4. And finally, it’s important to just have a project leader.
This person not only manages the project internally, but is the single point of contact within your company who owns all communication. This ensures that all messages from the company to the agency partner and back are clear and consistent. You don’t want to leave any room for misinterpretation.
Externally
1. A Business Strategy Expert.
You might be wondering why you need this with the above internal team involved…but it is important that your agency partner understands your business strategy and objectives as well and is driving that through the web redesign process on a daily basis.
2. A User Experience (UX) Designer.
This is the person who knows how to translate the business strategy into a web product and design an experience for your customers that will be easy to use and ultimately convert. Learn more about the importance of user experience design.
3. A Visual Designer.
This person takes the experience design and adds life to it, designing visuals that are on point with your brand and creating that emotional connection that will resonate with your audience.
4. A Development Team.
Hopefully this is self-explanatory, but this is a vital role. You need a development team supporting your project that will build something that is not only functional and follows the designed experience, but that is stable, reliable, and can scale as your business grows.
5. An Analytics Guru
This piece is often forgotten, but it’s important that someone think thoroughly through your analytics, not just plop in the Google Analytics tracking code and call it a day. You need to define what metrics mean success for your website and make sure that those specific things are easily viewable through your analytics platform.
6. A Strong QA Team.
Finally, you need to make sure that someone is focused on testing. Your site needs to work across a myriad of browsers, devices, and situations, so quality quality assurance (QA) is key.
With a team like this in place, both internally and externally, you should be on the road to a new website built for success.
