Siteimprove during a website redesign Report Overview This report focuses on the challenges faced during a website redesign project that Siteimprove can help alleviate. This report is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to performing a website redesign. This report is intended to demonstrate the value and importance of implementing Siteimprove Web Governance Suite (WGS) in the early stages of a website redesign project. This report focuses on the benefits of Siteimprove Web Governance Suite (WGS) during the 5 major phases of a redesign project: Research Planning Development Content Population Test and Launch Who is Siteimprove? Siteimprove provides organizations of all shapes and sizes with smart tools that make website management and maintenance both easier and more affordable. Siteimprove has a global presence with offices in Denmark, the UK and the US. The company proudly serves more than 1,200 organizations worldwide.
Table of contents 1. Research Choosing the right CMS Selecting the right analytics tool Evaluate your hosting Implement analytics early 2. Planning Improving navigation structure Reuse or rewrite content? Gathering user feedback Performing an inventory check Website policy adherence 3. Development Spread out the debugging process Optimize early Web accessibility matters 4. Content Population Finding content issues Avoid last minute panic Content accountability 5. Test & Launch Performing a final quality check Removing duplicate stylesheets Setting up 301 redirects Checking your privacy statement Launch with confidence
Phase One: Research Choosing the right CMS Before any website redesign can succeed, it s important to understand the issues the redesign is intended to address. Dig deeper than the common our website is outdated response and look at your current site through your visitors eyes. What problems do they encounter? Nearly all modern-day Content Management Systems (CMS) have a suite of useful tools built in, and no two are created exactly the same. In addition to that, most CMS s can be customized extensively. So how do you know which one is best for your organization, and how it should be customized? The answer is surprisingly simple: Look at the strengths and weaknesses of your current website, and choose a CMS that will minimize those weaknesses while playing to your strengths. For example, if your pages are frequently missing page titles or <h1> tags, consider a CMS setup that allows you to make these fields mandatory. Siteimprove Web Governance Suite (WGS) identifies issues with your current setup, enabling you to make educated decisions when choosing which CMS is right for your organization. Selecting the right analytics tool When choosing an analytics tool to measure the traffic on your new website, consider the level of expertise your users have. Google Analytics is a popular free program, but its complexity and lack of customer support make it confusing for the average user. An analytics program is useless if your web team cannot or does not use it. Choosing the right analytics tool can save you thousands of dollars in employee time and training, and morale. Siteimprove WGS is designed with the typical user in mind. Powerful measurement and tracking features packaged in an interface so simple, it requires an average of 30 minutes to learn. Evaluate your hosting Siteimprove Web Governance Suite constantly monitors site uptime and response rate from servers around the world. Reports detailing your site s performance give you the data you need to make an informed decision on whether or not your in-house hosting needs updating. Siteimprove WGS is also useful for measuring the accuracy of an external hosting provider s performance and uptime guarantees, so you can make informed decisions about whether or not your current provider is right for your new website. Implement analytics early Regardless of which analytics tool you choose, adding it to your current website several weeks before launching the redesigned site is critical. Due to differences in the way analytics programs calculate data, each will report slightly different numbers. If you switch analytics programs when launching the new site and the numbers displayed are suddenly 7% lower than before, how will you know if this is due to differences in reporting or a problem with your new site? Running multiple analytics programs on your website is common, and poses no threat to performance. This will give you a baseline with which to gauge your new analytics results. Is this a difference in reporting, or a problem with your new site? Switched analytics program? Old analytics numbers New analytics numbers
Phase two: Planning Improving navigation structure Who and what should receive placement in the main site navigation, homepage, or other high-visibility location? With no solid evidence leaning one way or the other, this debate usually grinds the website planning to a halt, sometimes for months. Missed deadlines, increased cost, and frustration Siteimprove Web Governance Suite helps you logically determine who should be placed where, and why. What should be on the homepage and main navigation? With Siteimprove WGS, you can track user journeys and measure how many clicks it takes your users to reach the content they want. Popular content requiring several clicks to access should be brought closer to the homepage, and information that users rarely look for should be moved further away. Siteimprove WGS also allows you to view terms that users have been searching for to determine what information isn t visible enough. Armed with this data, you can create a logical and objective site hierarchy that avoids political deadlock while optimizing your site for visitors. Reuse or rewrite content? Rewriting content is a difficult and time consuming endeavor, but often a necesssary expense. So how do you know which content to transfer over to the new site, and which to leave behind? With Siteimprove WGS you can identify which pages receive the least views to determine what content doesn t need to be transferred to the new site. Unlike most other analytics programs, Siteimprove WGS can identify the pages with the lowest number of views, giving you a comprehensive list of pages you don t need, thus saving you time and money carrying that content over. Gathering user feedback Siteimprove WGS allows you to gather direct feedback from your website visitors. This makes it easy for you to immediately see ratings and comments on your most popular pages, pages with high bounce rates, or any other pages you would like to improve. This enables you to make changes to your website based on user feedback and enhance your user experience right away. Performing an inventory check Use Siteimprove WGS to create exportable lists of all media files, documents, cookies, phone numbers, and more. This can save you hundreds of hours of searching your site and ensure that nothing is missed when transferring to the new site. Most common policy violations: Broken links, Misspellings, Missing page titles, Missing <h1> tags, Oversized images Website policy adherence Failing to follow web policies is the fastest way to turn a beautiful new website into a mess. So how do you ensure that the new web policies will be adhered to? The best method is to take a look at your current policy violations, and determine why they happened. If the document outlining policies and guidelines for publishing to your current website are obsolete or nonexistant, then your content contributors are likely to use whatever styles seem best to them in the moment. This Wild West approach, where everyone does as they please, can make any website seem stodgy and outdated. If this root problem isn t properly addressed, your new website will soon begin to look like your current site. Siteimprove WGS allows you to see an overview of the content on your website, so you can determine which elements of your web policy are being ignored, so you can adjust accordingly.
Phase Three: Development Spread out the debugging process Establishing a debugging process from the beginning ensures a smoother launch by spreading out the revision work, giving you more time to fix problems. This will also save significant amounts of time by catching issues with templates before they spread to every page on your site. During development, websites undergo countless revisions and changes, often causing links and images to break. These may go unnoticed, and can find their way into thousands of pages as the site develops. Avoiding mistakes entirely is unrealistic, so catching and correcting them immediately is critical to a smooth development process. Web accessibility matters The development phase is also the best time to ensure that all your page templates meet accessibility requirements. This will optimize your site for disabled users, increase search engine visibility, and prevent lawsuits. Testing and correcting accessibility issues is much easier to do before you add thousands of pages of content that may be affected by susequent changes to the templates. Optimize early Implementing Siteimprove WGS during the development phase saves an enormous amount of headache later on, helping to ensure that your new site performs well in search rankings rather than tanking your web traffic. If your organization uses its website as a major marketing or communication tool, even a single week of poor search engine results can have catastropic effects on your long-term goals. Proportion of U.S. Population with Visual Disabilities While mitigating litigation risk is important in its own right, the loss of website visitors is a far more common issue. According to a 2005 study, 6.8% of all people in the United States over the age of 15 are severely visually impared, 1 and depend on assistive technology to interact with websites. These users would be unable to properly access a website that does not meet accessibility standards. That number rises to 21.3% of the total population when you look at people over the age of 65. As if losing between 6.8% and 21% of your total market weren t frightening enough, the Dyslexia Research Institute estimates that between 10-15% of the total U.S. population have dyslexia. People with severe dyslexia may also depend on assistive technology, and could be similarly unable to access your website unless it meets accessibility standards. This means that if your website doesn t meet accessibility standards, you risk missing a staggering 16-21% of your total web traffic. 1 http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disability/sipp/disable05.html
Phase Four: Population Finding content issues As content is being added, edited and removed, there is a great risk of creating problems. Often hurried contributors use URLs on the current website to link to pages and images, intending for the link to be temporary, but then forget to relink after finishing. During development these links may work perfectly, but then suddenly break upon the launch of the site. Worse yet, they may link to images hosted on a different website entirely, opening liability to copyright claims as well as broken images in the event that the picture is taken down or moved on the external site. Another common mistake is uploading large images at full resolution to be resized in the browser, which slows the page load time considerably - especially on mobile devices. The picture may look perfectly normal, but will turn visitors into bounces as visitors are easily frustrated with slow load times. Siteimprove WGS identifies broken links as well as links at risk of breaking upon launch. Contributors are especially prone to submitting platformspecific documents during the population phase. Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents are the most common examples, and are also often the most problematic. Today more than 24% of all computers with Microsoft Office installed currently use an outdated version, and would not be able to open a document created in a Microsoft Office 2010 program. 1 Avoid last-minute panic As large amounts of content are being added to your website, issues such as spelling errors, broken links, and missing files will inevitably pile up. Waiting until a few days before launch creates unnecessary stress for all parties involved, and strongly increases the likelihood that damaging mistakes will slip through the cracks. Using Siteimprove WGS during the population phase will allow you to correct issues as you go, spreading the workload over a much more managable period of time. This also gives you the ability to make any necessary adjustments to guidelines and processes to minimize production issues. Content accountability When many contributors are adding content simultaneously, it becomes difficult to keep track of what information is on your site, and who s responsible for it. When a mistake is found, who should fix it? Siteimprove Web Governance Suite gives you an overview of the entire site, and allows you to send automated reports to each content contributor for the sections of the website under their responsibility. 1 http://www.statowl.com/microsoft_office.php Launching with Siteimprove WGS Launching without Siteimprove WGS
Phase Five: Test & Launch Performing a final quality check If ongoing quality checking has been kept up during the development and population phases, pre-launch testing should be much less stressful. Use Siteimprove Web Governance Suite to perform a final check for: Broken links Links to the current website Misspellings Accessibility issues SEO issues Removing duplicate stylesheets In addition to re-checking for these issues, you can run a final development check to ensure that no pages are linked to old style sheets. Often times in this stage pages are still linked to development copies of a stylesheet, which may be identical to the correct stylesheet, and therefore very difficult to find manually. However, if a change is made in the future to the main stylesheet, it will not update across the entire site unless all development copies of the CSS file have been removed. With Siteimprove WGS you can identify the pages with the most traffic from external sources, to create a list of the most important pages to redirect. Checking your privacy statement Making sure your organization s privacy statement is properly accessible on every page is one of the best ways to avoid misunderstandings. Sometimes the link to the privacy statement in the footer of a webpage can break, leaving your organization open to litigation. Use Siteimprove WGS to make sure that the footer on every page has the correct link to your privacy statement and prevent costly mistakes. Launch with confidence Once you have finished these final checks, you can launch with confidence. Imagine launching with peace of mind! You can also use Siteimprove WGS to find any remaining Lorem Ipsum text that may have been forgotten during template development. Setting up 301 redirects Chances are, you ve put a lot of time and money into your current website s SEO. Protect that investment by redirecting traffic from your old website to your new one is a standard practice for retaining your site traffic and search engine rankings. However, setting up redirects for every page is far too lengthy a process for larger websites because each page must be manually redirected.