Website Redesign: Should You Repaint or Rebuild?

As the economy begins to improve, more marketers will be investing in improving their Websites. Using a home improvement analogy, we can think of Website redesign as falling into one of three categories: repainting the house, repainting the house and adding a new room, or tearing down the house and starting from scratch.

Once you’ve decided what areas of your site you want to improve—search engine optimization, site organization, navigation, checkout, images, community features, personalization—you can determine the type of redesign to pursue.

1) New paint job. Homeowners frequently become dissatisfied with the exterior of their homes. They decide to improve curb appeal by updating the exterior with a paint job, possibly putting in new windows and changing the shutters as well, while leaving the electricity, heating, and plumbing intact. You may have a similar desire to reskin your site, changing the navigation structure a bit and adding additional features to entice customers to buy while keeping the fundamental functionality of the Website the same.

Within a typical redesign of this nature, the basic site taxonomy is left intact, with small modifications if necessary. The major benefit of this type of redesign is the smooth transition of the application layer of the site, since no functional changes are needed. The merchandising efforts will also be at a minimum because most of the site taxonomy will remain intact.

2) New paint job and additional room. A homeowner may decide that in addition to updating the exterior of the house, he would like to build an addition, which will require electricity, heating, and possibly plumbing. As an online marketer, you may decide that in addition to reskinning your Website, you want to introduce some new custom features such as alternative payment methods, enhanced navigation, customer reviews, or personalization.

In a redesign of this nature the taxonomy of the Website is updated in a small manner to allow for minimal changes in the way the customer shops the site. Additional attributes are created for business objects such as products and categories to provide the consumer with more information about the brand and product assortment. This sort of redesign will require HTML and CSS style changes, and the application layer will need to be enhanced to incorporate the “new room” to the storefront.

What’s more, additional merchandising will be required to incorporate the changes in site taxonomy. Typically, a dedicated environment will be needed for merchandising tasks, allowing the merchant team to merchandise the new site while maintaining their daily tasks on the old site. In addition, a dedicated development environment will be needed to make the updates to the application layer so that the existing site is not affected by test code.

3) House built from scratch. A homeowner may decide to keep his existing land but tear down the house and build a new one. The new house might be larger, with a completely different structure and amenities. Likewise, you may decide that your current Website is not working from a design and functional perspective. In this case, you may decide to move to a new platform or rebuild your existing application from scratch.

In a Web redesign of this nature, the site taxonomy is usually updated significantly, providing customers with new ways to shop the brand and site. Major business functionalities and business objects are created, often by integrating with third-party vendor solutions. If you plan on taking this route, you need to invest a significant amount of time designing a solution that will provide maximum functionality without compromising the design or the brand. Generally a new code base is created along with new HTML and CSS. You may elect to keep some functionality, but generally it’s ported over to the new code base.

Merchandising in this paradigm can be significant as well, as generally the taxonomy has completely changed. Typically a dedicated environment will be needed to allow the merchant team to merchandise the new site in addition to their daily tasks on the old site. And as with the “new room” model, you’ll need a dedicated development environment to make the updates to the application layer so that the existing site is unaffected.

How to get there
Clearly identifying which of the above types of redesign best suits your needs is an easy first step, one that design agencies and integration firms can help with. You should have clear, attainable, and measurable goals touching on key metrics such as traffic increases, average order values, conversion rate, and sales that your redesign should align with. For instance, if you’re looking for increased traffic, perhaps you should add more content as well as improve your SEO and SEM strategy. If sales and order increases are goals, then better product imagery and attribution may be added along with improvement in site search and navigation.

Savvy shoppers expect their online shopping experience to be intuitive and shop-able while providing relevant user-generated content and community/social interaction capabilities. You must identify the type of redesign you want to pursue based on your customers’ needs and define clear goals for the redesign to achieve success.

Shaun White is a product manager at e-commerce solutions provider Demandware.