Leading a Website Redesign: Six Critical Considerations

Throughout the year, we, along with our teammates at iFactory, create dozens of websites in close collaboration with our clients. They range from small projects (campaign landing pages) to very large undertakings (comprehensive sites for major universities). Sometimes, a client wants to redesign an existing site — a reasonable approach that involves numerous challenges, and demands the careful management of many internal and external inputs and variables. As you may know, leading such a project can be a high-risk and high-visibility role with significant accountability.

Working alongside our clients on a website redesign, our team emphasizes the importance of structured planning and focuses on establishing alignment on vision and strategy, content, technology, an unwavering focus on the user, and site governance. 

To help distill this into a manageable framework as you approach your next website redesign, here are six critical priorities for you as a project leader.

Priority 1. Project management and cross-functional collaboration

From the outset, it is essential to remember that your website redesign doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Depending on the purpose and scope of the redesign, your project will impact many areas of your organization, including IT, marketing communications, admissions or customer service, and legal. Your role is to orchestrate these moving parts, communicate effectively, align stakeholders, and manage competing priorities.

Project management, therefore, is a crucial function that serves to (1) facilitate key stakeholder input, buy-in, and participation, and (2) support all workstreams by ensuring coordination, managing dependencies, maintaining timelines, and facilitating effective communication. Given the importance of these tasks, this function must be delineated and resourced appropriately.

Priority 2. Strategy: Clarity on goals

As a very first step, establish a clear and shared understanding of why the redesign is happening. Clarity on purpose and goals is essential; your objectives must be specific and measurable from the outset. Without clarity, it’s easy to fall into the trap of designing for subjective and arbitrary internal preferences rather than real strategic and user needs.

Your strategy workstream establishes the foundation: business objectives, target audience needs, and success metrics. It guides all other work streams and ensures alignment with the organization’s broader strategic direction. Depending on the project’s scope, key activities may include leadership/stakeholder interviews, defining goals and KPIs, audience research and persona development, and project documentation.

Speaking of scope, sometimes a complete rebuild of your website is not a feasible strategy due to capacity limitations, cost, time, or other reasons. In fact, incremental, strategic improvements can deliver measurable results that help you meet your goals and stay within your budget or resource constraints. As Wayne Hagerty, our lead interactive developer, says, “Done is better than perfect.” The key is to work with what you have, keep your finger on the pulse of what matters most, and embrace phased progress. Your redesign goal should aim for step-by-step improvement, not all-at-once perfection. 

Priority 3. Content: First, not last

Often underestimated in redesign projects, content should be the driving force. Too many organizations approach design first and scramble to retrofit existing content into new templates — “reskinning,” as they say. A successful redesign starts with a thorough content audit, identification of messaging gaps, and the development of a clear messaging architecture. Your content needs to be purposeful, useful, and structured to meet your audience’s needs.

Charter this workstream to ensure content is relevant, accessible, and structured around user needs. Get up to speed on how to structure and create content that will attract AI queries; it’s no longer sufficient to simply optimize for Google search. Key activities for this workstream may include a content audit, messaging architecture and brand voice/tone guidelines, generative engine optimization, search engine optimization, accessibility review, and content writing, editing, and migration planning.

Priority 4. User Experience: A strategy, not a deliverable

User experience (UX) goes beyond interface design. It’s a strategic discipline and process that helps you understand and serve your audiences more effectively. A seamless UX requires insight into user behaviors, motivations, and barriers. It also means building with accessibility, responsiveness, and usability in mind. Our iFactory team embeds this thinking throughout its process, leveraging tools such as personas, journey mapping, and wireframes, all backed by accessibility audits led by our internal experts. See these additional insights; they’re applicable to any industry sector with diverse audiences, even though they are built on a higher education example.

The UX and visual design workstream transforms audience insights into intuitive and accessible designs. Key activities may include user journey mapping and wireframing, accessibility and usability testing, information architecture and navigation design, as well as visual design (UI, brand integration).

Priority 5. Technology and development

A primary goal is to ensure that your technology choices align with your communication goals, audience needs, and governance realities. This is a complex process and requires careful consideration.

This workstream will need to address platform selection, technical implementation, content management system (CMS) configuration, and integration with other systems. Key activities include CMS and hosting setup, front-end and back-end development, quality assurance, browser testing, and integration of search, forms, analytics, and third-party tools. Consider the following:

• Sites pull data from and push data to multiple systems: customer relationship management (CRM) tools, email platforms, event calendars, personalized portals, social media feeds, and more. Your development plan should account for secure and sustainable integrations that avoid custom-built solutions that are costly to maintain.

• The CMS you select should align with your team’s technical capabilities, scalability needs, and editorial workflows. Depending on the project’s scope, ask: Does the CMS support flexible content types? How easy is it to update? Can it scale to meet future needs, such as personalization, multilingual content, or CRM integration?

• Include generative engine optimization (GEO) in your scope. It isn’t just about writing better content, it’s about making sure AI systems can find, understand, and cite that content. Without proper technical implementation, even the most brilliant content optimization efforts will be limited in their AI search impact.

• Ensure your project workstream includes time for CMS training, editorial documentation, and refinement of the admin interface. Your team members must be capable of confidently maintaining the site after it launches.

• Before launch, your team should conduct a comprehensive quality assurance process that includes functionality testing across browsers/devices, accessibility audits using automated and manual methods, and performance testing.

Priority 6. Post-launch: Planning for success

The project doesn’t end at launch; it evolves. A successful redesign includes a roadmap for content governance, ongoing optimization, and performance tracking. From the outset, it is essential to define who is responsible for maintaining content, updating features, and measuring long term success. 

“The launch is not the end of the process; it is actually day one,” says Courtney Goldenshtein, iFactory’s Executive Producer. “Throughout the redesign process, it is important that our client partners are engaged deeply, to the extent that the site truly becomes their own, so that they know how to use it, monitor performance, and update and maintain it.”

The goal of the post-launch workstream is to ensure site sustainability after launch, including ownership, workflows, training, and performance improvement over time. Key activities include defining content ownership and update protocols, setting up analytics tracking and reporting dashboards, conducting training sessions for content editors, and planning post-launch evaluation and iteration.

Final thought

Website redesigns are high-profile, high-impact endeavors. Done well, they can amplify your brand, enhance the user/customer experience, and support your organizational goals and success. Focus on the six key priorities described here in your planning and execution, and you’ll be positioned to lead with clarity and confidence.