As great as your website may be, there will come a point when your page could use a little refreshing to reflect the changing goals and initiatives of your developing business. Be careful, though—going into the website redesign process without a framework to guide you may do more harm than good.

Have a Plan

Without the support of a creative team of designers and developers to create a plan and guide the development of your new site, your final product may end up failing to meet your goals and make your site appear even less up-to-date than it was before. The first step here is to determine why you need a redesign. Are you suffering from a lack of content? Did your business expand into new markets? Are you looking to project a more youthful corporate presence?

Prioritize your goals as a company and relay these to your design team to help establish a framework for the changes you hope to make.

Optimize Your Content

Once you have a plan, your goal should be to take advantage of the website redesign process to optimize your site layout, content, and navigation.

• Prune your content and weed out the fluff that may be taking up valuable web page real estate. This can mean outdated contact information, dead links, dried-up social feeds, or aging user comments.

• Bolster your site with new, fresh content and develop a new content creation schedule to bring new life to your online presence. This applies to your website copy as well—try to have it written ahead of time to give your developers something to work with.

• Include new media such as new images, video, and educational materials that your developers can integrate into your site. To make this easier on them, you can transfer large amounts of files at once with various online tools that make the process of keeping them in the loop easy and straightforward.

Formatting and Layout

Chances are that it’s been awhile since your last website redesign. Things have changed in the digital world and now is the perfect opportunity to have your site change with it.

Stress intuitive-front end web design that has clear navigation, is easily scannable, and is optimized for use across multiple devices, such as phone and tablet. These can be tall orders for any design team, but the use of online work management tools that host discussions, provide cloud-based services for uploads, and track progress can help keep your disparate group organized and focused.

And while you’re reformatting your site layout, keep your content layout in mind as well. What type of site do you have? Are you sales-focused with a need for navigation that directs customers through your sales funnel and promotes engagement? Do you provide educational material with a need for uniform landing pages and easily accessible additional resources for further reading?

This is where your corporate web goals come back into play. Your design team can help manage the layout of both your front-end navigation and content to ensure that your users get the experience that your brand wants to project.

Design with Purpose

The website redesign process can be confusing when approached without goals in mind. Keep your development team in the loop when constructing an outline for your website redesign to ensure that you’re both on the same page. Good communication and a creative development team are the two secrets to success that your website redesign needs.