Stop us if you’ve heard this before: an organization makes an amazing website, launches it, and doesn’t touch it again for some time. Fast forward, the website has been up for several years. In that time they’ve made little or no changes to it. That three to five year old website looks sad and tired. Everyone hates it.
Challenges of a Redesign
So, your leadership team decides to get a new website. You secure a smallish budget for the project. You send out your RFP, hoping to discover that dream website developer. You read the dozens of twenty-page proposals. And it takes way, way longer than the two weeks review time you promised in the RFP.
Now you’re exhausted and the enthusiasm for the new website design is long gone. You throw out the proposals from people and firms that are clearly not a good fit. You throw out the ones from the serious firms that are leading experts in their field, but want to charge what sounds like an insane amount of money.
You filter through the remaining options looking for :
- What style of design you like
- Pricing you can live with
- A design team you can trust
Next, you pick two or three you like the best and invite them to pitch an idea for your new site! Questions are asked and answered. The presenters smile a lot and showoff killer slide decks. Your organization picks one. A contract is signed and the selected firm opens a bottle of champagne. Time and money is spent to create a new, modern website. It’s clean. It’s functional. It’s responsive. Hoo-rah!
Rinse and Repeat…
Three to five years later, the organization finds its had a website up all this time, and have made little to no changes to it. So it looks sad and tired and everyone hates it. Now, revisit paragraph two of this blog and read from there. It’s annoying, right?
It’s totally inefficient. Most of the time, your website is not up to modern standards. Most of the time it does not look current or fresh. Most of the time it’s not performing as well as it should. This model of website maintenance is like owning a car. The second you drive it off the lot, it starts losing value.
Maintain Your New Modern, User-friendly Website
Here’s how to change all of that. Once you do your next major website redesign, vow to never do it again. Instead, perform the following tasks monthly:
- Monitor changing technology.
- Update your site.
- Make small changes often.
- Learn from user feedback and adapt the site to it constantly.
- Track key metrics tied to important strategic goals.
- Learn, again, from user behavior and adapt design, copy, and features as needed.
If you do this, your site will never again be sad and tired and hated. It will remain a technically current, modern design that can deliver real, measurable value on goals you care about.