Uncover What Website Redesigns Get Totally Wrong!

What's my first response? I see Eyes roll. Then there's usually a grunting sound. It's kind of a guttural thing. Suppressed rage. Suppressed rage. Yeah. Yeah. There's usually I hear shattering glass.

Welcome to the marketing team at one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host, Eric and Mike. How's it going, Mike? Good. Ready to talk about websites. I'm always ready to talk about websites.

It's kinda your jam, isn't it? Yeah, it's kind of, yeah. You live in a website encrusted world, don't you? It's the It's the path I came. It's the yellow brick road I've been following. Love that. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, you get a call oftentimes, yeah. About people who say, Hey. I want a website or maybe I wanna redesign my website or, right.

I mean in the, oh, that, yeah, that happens. And it's usually a very somewhat reactionary call on their part in a sense. Yeah. Where they maybe are frustrated. Yeah. Maybe they've got some issues. Maybe somebody from high above is said, you know what? My sister-in-law tried to go on our website the other day and she couldn't find that.

Fill in the blank, right? Yeah, yeah. Or you know, that member called us and said that they were looking on the website and they couldn't do X, whatever that would be. Yep. Register. Yeah. Whatever. It's what, what kind of things have you heard? What, speak to me from the trenches, Mike. What? What are some The TRE trenches?

Yeah, the war stories. I think a lot of times we get questions or like, Hey, oh, we need to, we need a new website. Mm-hmm. And. I like to caution people that like, that's not, that's not something that's for the faint of heart. Right? True. Like there's, there are some things that are fixable. That aren't like destroying your house and building a new one, you know what I mean?

Like mm-hmm. Maybe you just need new wallpaper in your bathroom. You don't need, uh, to tear down your house. Well, I, I like that analogy. 'cause in a, in a sense, I feel like some of the website projects you've been involved in, we, we could have literally built homes quicker than actually building their new website, so Yes, yes.

The, yeah, and I would say that those. Probably suffered from a lack of planning that I wanna address today. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. 'cause there's so much can be figured out in those preliminary stages of Yep. Yeah. Redesigning or building a new website. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think going into a new website project and not.

Planning or asking the right questions ahead of time just creates some of those really painful things. Ask anybody that's gone through a big website redesign project, and they'll probably put it right there on the list of least desirable activities in their life next to like root canals and mm-hmm.

You know, like, yeah. Elected surgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. I don't know. I don't think it has to be that way, but I think a lot, you can prevent a lot of that pain if you go in eyes wide open, or ask yourself right away. Mm-hmm Do we really need to go this far or do we need to, you know, make some tweaks? So that would be one of the first questions my ask.

Yeah. I mean, before we get into the whole thing, like why, why would you wanna redo your website? Mm-hmm. I mean, sometimes it's just old, right? Like the way that websites were done 10 years ago. They are now. It's completely different, you know. Well, let's talk about that timeframe. I mean, is 10 years kind of a, a good kind of idea in your head?

That seems like a long time ago. I've seen a lot of sites that haven't been touched in 10 years now. I used to say like, if it was over like five or six or something like that, um, and there were some telltale signs. I was just trying to come up with a number. Yeah, that is like, if it's 10 years, do it. Like, like no, there's no question.

No question. Yeah, no question. Just do it. But I'm assuming if you did it 10 years ago. You know, mobile devices were still, you know mm-hmm. Maturing and everything like that. There might not have been a lot of standards and things that you're doing. Yeah. So that's e easy 10 years. You should strongly consider, but even like five years, I know that we've got some clients that they, they're very great about, like, you know what, it's been five years.

We really need to take a look at this. Yeah. And so let's, let's start the process and what does that, you know, that could entail a lot of different things. Sometimes it's not a full redesign. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of not, of continual improvements over time. Yeah. And not, not these big resets like.

They're painful. They're, they're just, it's a lot of work. And if, especially if you got a hundred other things going on, like going, redoing your website is not something you really wanna do. If you can embrace the long-term vision for this thing and know that it is something that needs care and feeding and continual attention mm-hmm.

You're gonna be better off in the long run. But let's say you're not doing that, and I know a lot of people don't like, it's just like certain things change and. It's time to redo the idea. So a lot of people that we've found, and maybe this is changing, I hope it is a little bit, but it's like set it and forget it.

Like, yeah, I built the website five years ago, it should be fine. Yeah. But that's not the case. There's other things to consider, like it should you redesign or not? Like, um, I think a big one that we're seeing a lot is, um. Like a DA compliance thing, right? Mm-hmm. Like if you've got an older site that, that it wasn't built with that in mind, it's, it might be a really good excuse to take a fresh start with it because retrofitting or, or doing some mitigation on an existing site, it in some cases can be, um, painful.

Yeah. Especially if you, um, if some of your a DA things are like. Kind of design related, like if they're color contrast issues, type size issues, like you're gonna have to make so many changes. You might as well just look at redesign. So when you talk a DA, and we can maybe do a whole other podcast on a DA compliance, it does a DA compliance specifically relate only to things we'll call on the front end or the design look and feel?

Is it more on the structure and the back end? The coating the. How things work and the functionality of it, everything. Is there a percentage breakdown? 50%. 50%? Or is it No, I mean, I think it's all, it should be all, I think it should be viewed as an inclusive, all those things. Okay. The, the, the putting a page up on the website is not just a design thing.

It's not just a build thing. It's all the things together. Okay. So it's an equal weighted kind, an issue sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So that's the reason for exploding a website and then building and presenting a brand. Yeah, because it's just so many, there's so many entanglements that it might be. Okay. And if you, if the site wasn't built with a DA compliance in mind, it's probably older than five years or more, I would assume if you've done anything in the last three or four years and you didn't have an eye on that, you weren't paying attention, or, I don't want, I don't, I don't want to make that sound rude, but it, it, like, I could see how it wasn't a priority, but, um, well, there was a, it should be now.

Yeah. I think in the, in the cultural lexicon, a DA had, its. You hear about it now, it's mentioned more as just kind of a standard. Mm-hmm. But it, it gained real high notoriety, maybe five years ago, six years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Where it was a focus. Yes. Now it's also, it's not as much of a focus, it's just a, you have to do this kind of a thing.

It's just an understood thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So other than a DA, what other reasons would people. I mean, do we need to identify it or are people pretty much aware of what they, I would think it, the, the only other reason I would say that you should consider it is if. It really doesn't reflect who you are and what you do anymore.

Mm-hmm. Like, and that can happen like as, as maybe there's a shift in leadership, maybe there's a shift in direction, maybe there's something where New brand maybe. Yeah, yeah. Or especially if you've done a re a, a rebrand or something like that. You definitely should look and usually look at it. Usually when we do a rebrand, it's, there's a website attached to that project as well.

Yeah, totally. So when you update a website. That the idea is that a website is up, up to date. It's kind of your newsroom. It's Yeah. Everything current going on in your world. And I think it, the mechanics around updating that website, uh, that's a, yeah. If, honestly, if your website, if you dread making any kinda updates or changes to your website, there you go.

That's a huge reason to re, to consider redesigning because it shouldn't be that way. Yeah. Like the platforms have matured enough to where it, you don't need to be a coder. You don't need to know ht ML like, like you should be able to get in there and quickly make a change that you need to make and move on with your day.

Yeah. Um, if it's hard or it's confusing or you don't know where to go, it, it's probably time to look at Yeah. The industry is, is really shifted into making it. Friendly for anybody of any skill to get in there and make a website update. So if you're struggling, I like that. Yeah. That's a definite reason to like, there's long-term efficiencies, you'll see, but from the.

Yeah. Short term pain of doing, doing the new website, the long term gain would be, um, ease of use and, okay. Let's talk a little bit about what the process looks like to redo your redesign, rebuild your website, whatever we're calling it. Does this apply to every size website? Let's say I've got a three page website.

Does it apply to that just as much as it would a. 300 page website. This process is a lot more relevant for large sites and essential for large sites. I think following the, some of the steps in the process for a small site, um, three pages, I don't know, but like six to 10. Mm-hmm. It might be helpful to follow this.

The all steps, like an abbreviated version of this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So each one of those steps will take a lot less time, but I think they are important because if you don't follow them. You, you could just, you have more misunderstandings down the road. Yeah. Okay. And so, so these key steps are val valid, regardless of the size, it's just the amount of time it takes to complete each step.

So what we're will be more on a larger site. We're talking like page websites that start at 25, 30, 40 pages. It is vital. This is vital for the, yeah. Yeah. 'cause you've done websites that when you get into it and. Part of the process is to like, figure out how many pages actually exist on websites. 'cause a lot of people sometimes don't even know.

Oh gosh, they're so big. We had one that was 1200 pages, um, recently, I think. Yeah. Um, and yeah, that's, yeah. Were they shocked? You imagine going into a redesign where you're like, oh, we have to deal with 1200 pages. Yeah. Ouch. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. So they probably didn't even know they had 1200 pages.

They knew they had a lot, but I think the number kinda surprised them. Yeah. In some cases you might have 1200 of them and 800 of them are like a blog post or a news story or something like that. Mm-hmm. You know, so, and as we get through the process, the, you can, you can kind of wave a wand at those and go, yep, those are all that thing.

We don't have to put, you know. A bunch of attention on 800 individual. Just apply a template maybe or something. Yes, yes. But, but that's, that's what really leads into the first step really. It's like, really we need to audit what we have. We need to set the baseline for where we're at. Yeah. On this website redesign before we go anywhere.

Right. Um, what we like to do is audit. A bunch of a bunch of things about the website primarily. Let's look at all the pages that we have on there. Let let, let's get an inventory of everything we have on the site. That would include the web, the, the pages themselves, um, PDFs that we've linked to, other documents that we've, um, included.

Um, we use a couple different tools to crawl the site. Those things will really help you audit things. So you, you look at, you've got your content, inventory of things. The other thing that's really important I think is to help you make decisions down the road is looking at your analytics. Mm-hmm. And if you don't have analytics on your website, well shame on you.

But two, like put it on. 30 days before you even get at least a month's worth of something of data before you start doing any of this stuff. So, you know, push back your planning a little bit, get some data before you can. Hmm. Interesting. So even if they don't have it day one, install it when you decide to go do this to try to just Yeah.

Extract some, sort, some data, some, some stuff's better than others. Yeah. And I think what we see with a lot of websites, especially the ones we work with, there's not. A lot of variance between month to month and everything like that. Um, especially if you're not doing a lot to keep it updated or introducing a lot of new landing pages or features or something like that.

If your, if your website's, you know, purely informational. Yeah. Um, things don't change too much. So you could, a month might be a, at least a, you have an informed. Decision instead of just flying blind based on intuition. And you look at what, you look at where people are going, how do they get to the website, how long are they spending on the pages?

Just the basic stuff is what you're looking, basic stuff. But I think most imp, one of the things I like to look at the most is like, which pages are getting the most traffic? Which ones are getting the least amount of traffic, right? Mm-hmm. Like there might be a page that you hold dear to, to you and Right.

You think it would, it's the most important thing. And then you find out that like. We've only had only three visits to this page this year. Ouch. Like, you might not, it might not be worth the effort to move that over to the next thing. Ideally, in this, you're collecting all this inventory in a spreadsheet, so you can include the, the list of pages, the amount of traffic it gets, um.

And those are the essentials really. Okay, so we've got our data, we've got our inventory of pages. Yep. Is that everything in the audit? I would look at SEO stuff too. And um, so if you looking at what terms that you think you're. Your audience or is mm-hmm. Gonna be searching to find you and see how you're ranking.

And again, this is where like a tool from App Sumo or something like that could be really helpful. Okay. Like you can see, I wouldn't go into like a deep, deep keyword research thing. I'm not talking about doing a big old SEO audit of things. Right. That would help. But I, I, but, um, I think just looking at basics, you know, like what do you do?

What do people search for to find that? Right, right. Is there a match? Yep. Um, but also look at like, and you can, in your spreadsheet, you can look at like how those rang, uh, like the rankings or how well they're, they're trafficked or something. Um, Google Search Console does a really good job of helping you kind of see what, um, details about how Google.

Gets to your site, like, and that's different than analytics on your existing website. That's something that's, yeah. Analytics only takes care of the traffic on your website, what's happening on the site. Yeah. Whereas Google Search Console gives you an idea of how many times people have searched for terms that are near yours.

How many times do you, your listing or your page has shown up in the search results, and then how many times people have clicked through. Gotcha. So it kind of bridges this gap between. People searching outside, inside kind of a thing. Yeah. Okay. And you can link it into Google Analytics. So you still have that.

So it's all together in a dashboard to, to see. You can look through the analytics tools and gotcha. And jump back and forth and everything. But those, those are really helpful when you're auditing things and figuring out your pla, your website's place in the world. The one thing you really wanna identify here is, um, if you've got pages that are ranking well.

In the search, you don't wanna lose the out on those. So you either wanna keep them, um, specifically the URLs, keep them there, or have a plan to redirect them so you don't lose the, the goodwill you've built up because with the search engines, when you do this redesign, yeah, the search engines keep a record and they have a history and there's equity in that history of performance around certain content on your website.

So that's a real danger if people just break down and tear everything down and redo everything. You've lost all of that equity. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's an important part to this as you go into restructuring or rebuilding a website, is to look at those high value pages, high value content, make sure you maintain that URL and you have, there are ways to maintain it or redirect it to the new one.

Yeah. And we'll get into that in a minute. Okay. But, um, yeah, I've seen a lot of people where they don't take an assessment of where they are. Yeah. And their rankings are, and they read. Redo their website and then look a couple months later, I'm like, oh, wow. Our, we used to be, you know, yeah. Number three in the rankings and now we're 37.

You know, like this redo has Yeah. Messed us up. Yeah. So, okay, so, so auditing ahead of time and getting that all in your collection is a super important, um. Piece sets the sets, the groundwork for the rest of your planning helps you make better decisions as you go forward. So we've audited the site. Is that everything then for the site you've got inside graphic, outside performance, you do basic performance of how the content's performing on the page as far as like page loads or anything like that?

Or is that even relevant do you think? I, we used to look a lot at like how fast things load and everything, but I think that's kind of, that issue's kind of moot. If you're gonna be redoing your website. Okay. So it doesn't matter. So like if you were to go in and you wanted to keep your existing site doing those page speed like audits and everything.

Yeah. And then looking at ways you could optimize what's there already is super valuable. But if we're redesigning a site that's, that's going to, there's another, there are other places in the process to check the speed and improve it. Yeah. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't say it as a baseline. Right. It's not That's a looking back thing.

Yeah. That maybe is a reason people called you Exactly. For, for a redesign. Exactly. It's like, hey, this stuff is slow. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. We've audited the site, we now have our audit. Yep. This is a valuable piece of information that we can use. Then to do what with this, I think this is something you can look back to you.

It's your, it's your research, it's your reference material. Right. I think the next step is really taking a fresh look at. What's the purpose of your website and what are your goals, right? Mm-hmm. So the pur uh, being crystal clear about why you have a website in the first place mm-hmm. Will, should help you make some of these decisions going forward too, right?

Like, is your website like educational or informational, right? Like there's a certain approach that you would wanna take for that? Is it to generate leads? Um, are you selling stuff directly, like. And a lot of websites might have all of those purposes, but like really just be very clear about why you have this there and, 'cause I think that could be used as a filter later on when you're trying to plan this out.

Making sure that like, these are the pur, this is the purpose for our website, right? Here's all this content we wanna create. You can, or here's the stuff we need to include in there. If it comes down to. Arguing be, and I've seen this happen arguing between people like you go like, does this fit the purpose of what we're trying to do here?

Right. Well, no. Then we can, we're not saying we don't include it on the website, but we deprioritize it 'cause it's not, and it's a nuanced conversation. It is. 'cause a website does multiple things. But I think you had mentioned a concept the last couple, couple weeks ago we were talking about this jobs to be done.

Yep. That's another thing to look at. What, what are people coming to the website to come do? Yeah. That should be part of that as well, right? You kinda, yeah, I was just gonna talk about that. Uh, well, so we know the purpose. Yeah. And then we gotta talk about the goals. Right. And so the, I I think there's two goals that we need to, when we're building a website, we need to make sure that we're operating in, there's the, there's the organization's goals.

Like the, the reason we have a website. Mm-hmm. Like. Beyond the purpose of the website. There's the, we have goals for our website. We want that. We need to achieve educating our members more. We need to, you know, get more registrations for this thing. We need to collect more leads, right? Mm-hmm. Like you can attach goals to those initiatives, right?

But I think even more important is thinking about your. Visitors your users' goals. Okay. Right. A, the, a successful website is in the overlap. There was like you're meeting both. Yep. Right. And so. Yes, we need to know what our goals are for the website, but I think we should spend a lot of time thinking about what are the user's goals for the website, and that's where the jobs, there's a, there's a, a bunch of material online about jobs to be done, and, and it's a, it's a common user experience framework.

The user experience geeks will get into and mm-hmm. There, there's a lot of layers to this and it is very important if you're going deep into user experience stuff. Um. But if you can think it from a simplified point of view, like why is someone coming to your website? What are they trying to accomplish by coming to your website, right?

It's better not to assume why what people are going there. If you have feedback from people, that's super important. If you can interview people that. Like five, 10 people mm-hmm. That, you know, use your website and think about what they're trying, what they're trying to accomplish. This will help you better plan out the goal, their goals for the website.

Okay. But they usually will have a certain amount of things that they're trying to accomplish. Like, and keeping that in mind, keeping what the, what are the user goals there and listing all of those out is, is really important. And it will help you make the decisions down the road. Okay. For, for everything.

Yeah. Goals. Goals. Goals. We've talked about. Goals, goals, goals. Goals. Okay, so now we've talked, we've established all of our goals, and this is a process that depending on the size of the organization, takes some facilitation on some level. It could, yes, could. It's not like, just tell me your goals, and then they're like, oh, 1, 2, 3.

Here you go, Mike. It's already. That's a conversation, that's a workshop sometimes. Yeah. We, we, we typically, when we're working with clients, we'll, we like to hold a, a workshop with all the stakeholders and make sure that the, the organization's goals are represented, but also feedback that they get from people.

Mm-hmm. And, and some of that anecdotal information can help us determine some overlap between. User's goals and the, yeah. Organization's goals. It's easy to say goals, but sometimes those are the hardest things to really pull from our clients. Yeah. 'cause it's a complicated, there's a lot of different interests at stake sometimes.

Yep. That have different goals that sometimes are competing, but most of the time everybody's pretty well aligned. It's just. What are the levers and how mm-hmm. Powerful are each of those levers in that or in that conversation, and if you're doing this internally, if you're trying to facilitate this with other people.

Yeah. One thing that we really like to do is when we have these workshops and we get 10 people in a room and we're talking about goals and everything like that, I really like to prioritize. I ask them. Yes. These are all very valid goals, but if you had to pick just one. Yeah. Which one's most important, and if you can consensus from everybody on that one.

We're not saying that's the only one we're going for. We're just like, it helps hierarchy set some prior. Yeah, yeah. Set some prioritization on it. That's usually really helpful. All right, so we've audited, we have our goals. Yep. We have our jobs to be done. Yep. Maybe. Third. Third step. What? What's next? Just start drawing, right?

Drawing on paper? Yeah. I mean, yes. Really? Yeah. You got it. Okay. Just guessed. Okay. I, there's a bunch of different ways to do this, but really what we're talking about is designing the information architecture for the website. Huh? Okay. So. There's a few things that go into that in a general thing. This is where we really like to do a site map.

I find it really helpful to do the kinda like tree based thing where you've got a homepage is all you. Hey, there's one for free. Homepage. Homepage. Make that decision for you. Go. Homepage is ready. Everyone should have one. Yep. And then what's the other, what's the next level of navigation? Um. You could draw it on a whiteboard, you could write on stickies and organize them on a whiteboard.

Um, there are great digital tools too. We use one called, uh, a program called Loom. Mm-hmm. Which, um, is really, um, it has some ai, um, added benefits to you. You can prompt it and it'll try and give you a structure right up front that you can start manipulating and everything. Um. There's, there's a ton Fig Jam.

Does that still exist? Yeah, that totally exists. Yeah. Yeah, you could do that. That one's a little bit closer to a, um. Digital. Whiteboard, whiteboard, yeah. Type thing. But if you're working remotely with people and you wanna collaborate on that, that's a great, a great, great cool piece too. So really think about the orca, the architecture of your main sections of the website, right?

Mm-hmm. And the, so the homepage is a given some of those other top level things, trying to group together some of those. Um, jobs that people are trying to get done. What are, what are people looking for? Trying to intelligently group together the things, and this is where it go. Looking at your inventory, looking at like what's important, what kind of information, what kind of jobs.

There's a lot of testing out and figuring it out and everything that can go into this. One helpful thing you can do with a team too, and a really good hack for all this stuff is if you've created your site map together. If you go into. Any program, sorry? Any file based program? Yeah, so it could be your, your desktop, it could be Google Drive, could be, um, Dropbox, whatever your team is using.

Right. If you create like nested folders that match your architecture. Okay. You can have people test it out. So, um, so they can go through and say, okay, from the homepage, now we've got this list of folders, here's this organization of things. If we wanted you to find this one thing that goes back to the user goals, right?

Yep. The, of what they're trying to find. How would you go about finding this? And if they, if they, if they say, yeah, that made total sense, you're on the right track. If they stumble, some people like in, in user experience. Um, circles. They'll do like screen recordings or like do mm-hmm. Do user, live user tests of people Testing this out is a quick and easy way to make sure that your, that's site map is on track.

That's a really accessible tool that anybody can build. Anybody has it Just, everybody has Google Drive with, here's the homepage, just click through folders. Is the folders. Yeah. Yeah. I like that idea. That's cool. And there's a lot of. Nuance that goes into site mapping, but um, creating that site map is a huge piece of the puzzle.

Well, I think one of the examples that comes to my mind on a super complicated type of a website is. A, a website that has multiple purposes that are all equally important in a sense. Yep. And I think of, like Kaiser Permanente was a site that I think they've redesigned since, but they had a, it's almost like a gate at the beginning of their website.

Yeah. Wait a minute, are you a patient, are you a provider, or are you insurance? Yeah. And it's like there's three or three simple doors to go through that help people navigate. So that could be something where you gotta back way out. Totally. And if it's a really complicated site, like maybe set that up first and let people understand.

'cause each of those are gigantic websites under each of those doorways. That just reminds me, I totally glossed over in the, in the goals and, um, thing really identifying who your key audiences are. Yeah, because you might have more than one, right? Like, and making sure that you. Establish what, when we talked about the jobs to be done and everything like that.

Yeah. That they're specific to the audiences that you, that you're catering to. Yeah. Um, I would also try and prioritize those and, and like in your example, it may be really hard to say which one's most important. That's why they have that like equal Yeah. Gateway of things, but. For a lot of people, it's not all that equal.

And the prioritization will help you make decisions on how you set the architecture. Okay? Like, for example, I love to tell this story, but like we did this whole exercise and we created a, a site map and put it into some mockups for, for a webpage. And we had a, I had to give a presentation in front of 20 people to talk about this stage, right?

Mm-hmm. And, um. One of the loudest people of these 20 was offended and mad that we didn't have a link at the very top for their board of directors. Hmm. Meeting minutes and everything. Well, that's all well and good, but the on the list of the priority of our audiences, the board of directors was like number six.

Yeah. Right. Like we shouldn't be taking up valuable. Real estate there for a group of 12 people. Yeah. Right. And so organizing your, your, your audiences and prioritizing them helps you make better decisions on the site mapping. You know how when you walk into a target and a lot of 'em have a Starbucks right there next to it.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Well, what if they decided that their loss prevention office should be right there? Yeah. Super important. Yeah. Yeah. Super. But like, they don't, they don't, they don't put everything right up front for you and everything. They're catering to the needs of the people coming in, the primary people coming in.

All right, so we've made pretty pictures, boxes with, we've got all those things. The other thing I want to, you really wanna take a look at when you're designing your like information architecture, and this kind of comes back to talking about articles or blogs or something like that, if you can identify, especially looking at your inventory of things like types of content that have very similar.

Um, fields or content, like there's a top, there's a structure to them. Yeah. That's, that's repeated. Um, identifying that and going a little bit deeper on those things to map out the content. So a good example would be blogs, articles, or something like that. But like, if you do events regularly, if you have a, a significant people section where you have mm-hmm.

A good example with people, right? Like you might have decided that you need their headshot, their name, their title, their phone number, their email, their bio, their LinkedIn profile, their Twitter profile, or X profile, right? Those are all like, those are structural things that you would apply to every person in your organization, right?

Instead of like thinking of those as separate pages in your site. You can. Create that as like a data type or a content type, and that, um, later on in the process, it actually makes those, creating the content for those a little easier. You could, you could actually put a lot of that stuff maybe into a database and import it into your site when you're building it later.

Let's say you had an organization with 50 people that you wanted to list on the website, right? If you're doing a site map. And would you wanna list out, like if you're we're doing it with stickies, would you wanna put 50 stickies on your board there? Mm-hmm. Or would you just put a stack of 'em and say, Hey, this is our people section.

Yeah. And then worry about that. Like you said, it's like a Google folder structure in a sense. I mean, visually, that's what it looks like too, almost, right? It's just square of, yeah, like think of it like an org chart, almost like visual too. Like, um. That's, uh, that's a really helpful way. I've seen a lot of really creative and really fascinating other mm-hmm.

Models for diagramming out. Um. Site maps and everything, because sometimes the, the links aren't necessarily like structurally deep, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like there's a lot of cross linking in the web and everything like that. That's, that's pretty advanced stuff. I think if you can just use. Stickies or some kind of like basic, that's all like what you just structure talked about the the relink a tree.

The, the, the spider web that happens after the fact. That's more like lower Yes. Down the process kind of a thing. It would be deep, yeah. Further on in our process of, all right, so we've got our, um, ugly pictures of boxes with text in them. Yep. What's next? We're going even further away from drawings and going into a spreadsheet.

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Um, what we like to do is create a, a, a content matrix. Uh, so we've already, we've got our visual structure of all this, and now, now we need to add color in more details for each one of these things. Right? And so the spreadsheet has a listing of all the pages that you plan on in your new website.

And a, and a lot of times what we'll do is we use the same spreadsheet that we've. Done our audit in, and we have our existing website, and then we create a new tab that shows the new website plan. Here's all this. That stuff just reorganized into these. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so along the way with our site mapping tool, ideally we've been looking at our audited list of things and trying to make sure that, do we need to include that page, do we not?

Mm-hmm. And everything. And so when you get the new page or your new spreadsheet, ideally your list of pages is a lot shorter. That's a process that we really have to rely on the client to perform is to go through and make a no go go list. Is that right? Or do we, do we Um, sometimes, like I, sometimes it's pretty, pretty black and white.

Like Okay. I would say a lot of times if we're redoing the website, the reality is we're not necessarily. Migrating a lot of stuff like the mm-hmm. The news articles or, you know, blog pieces or some of that stuff. That stuff is a more direct thing, but usually we're solving a bigger need. Like the information is way outta date or we've got, in a lot of cases, we've got too much information and it's too much to keep up with and everything.

Well, especially like, like you said, news, news has got a shelf life on it. Yes. So, I mean, there's just kind of a. One month, 90 day cutoff, which like, that's fairly irrelevant. We may not, not even need to include it. Right. Depending on the audience and the, you know, like that's where we could throw it back.

But I don't like, I think I'm. Taking this from the, if you're trying to do this all yourself Okay. And everything, like you would, you would be vetting a lot of the, the almost everything in here. Yeah. But I would pay less attention to the news and blog things. I would just say like, Hey, if we said something about this three years ago, it's probably outta date and we can not Yeah.

Worry about those. Okay. Um, content matrix. So yeah, that really just remaps and cuts out edits the. What each page, the basic for what each of those pages has as far as its content. So think of it as a spreadsheet. You've got the name of the page. Mm-hmm. Super important. Right? Um, assigning a priority to this, like how I like high, medium, low, whatever you want to do to mm-hmm.

Assign this, um. Going through that and assigning like this, this page is essential for us. And, um, we'll come back to this part later, but yeah, it's establishing a priority for each of the pages that you're putting into your plan mm-hmm. Is really important. Helps you make decisions down the road. Um, putting in, and this is where like doing the auditing before.

Is there an old URL that maps to this page? Um, what's the new URL Are we, uh, there might be some benefits to rearranging it. If you're doing an SEO audit upfront, there are some benefits to maybe changing the URL, but having old and new allows you to make sure that you can redirect things when you launch the new website effectively.

Oh, you've got the mapping and so you've got it. Got it in there. Making note of. What, what is this page? Is it brand new? Is it editing an existing page? I are we migrating it as is making sure that you've got that assigned on each row so you have a good idea of what's going on. If you're working with a team where you.

Subject matter experts for certain things. Having a column about like assigning that page, like the owner of that page is really helpful, uh, to go in and re-look at it maybe. Yeah. And make sure that it's still relevant or accurate. Yep. Okay. Yeah. And then sometimes on the spreadsheets, I like to have like a notes column where we can like just quickly mention something of relevance to it.

We use a lot of Google sheets and everything, so the commenting tools in there are really helpful for that too. But, um. To add that context to it. But at the end of this whole thing, you've got more details about the structure of your website than the than you would ever wanna put into a visual okay thing.

You've got a tracking document, you've got the beginnings of putting together a plan because you've got a list of all the pages you need to work on. You know who's gonna be working on them, you know, whether you need to. Do something new for it, or if it just needs light editing, you know how important it is to the overall goals of launching the website.

And so, so you've got this, this content matrix really becomes like a key planning document. Yeah. For your website project. It's a reference point that everybody who's working on this project can go back and see what needs to be done. Where does it live? How is it organized? Does it need to be optimized?

Does it all the, this is probably one of the most critical pieces to this, right? Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't do a website redesign without this spreadsheet. Okay. Well, Mike, that's a bold statement. Yeah. I mean, really like without. Without that spreadsheet. Yeah, there it's really hard to plan what you're doing and everything.

Like we take it a step further is once we've got that content matrix in there, we load that all up into Clickup on, and we use that as our starting point for. Managing the website project. Everything can be assigned out, deadlined and all that stuff within Clickup. And then everybody knows what work and every, and what's great about it, putting, moving it out of the spreadsheet.

And you can still manage it within the spreadsheet? Yeah, but we put it into Clickup because we can have a dialogue about each page. In the commenting tools of Clickup and we can track the status of individual pages Yeah. As they move through the, the process. But that without that map of things, it's a, it'd be really painful to do a website that's Of any size.

Yeah. Like anything over, you know, 10, 15 pages. So that's it. Then we're ready to start. Is that it? I would, I, yeah, I look, I would look at all that stuff and like, depending on your answers to, is this a high priority page? Mm-hmm. Do, are we just migrating it? Are we editing it? Do we have to create new content?

I would start kind of putting together a plan. How long do you think it'll take you to do the. Each type of page and Yep. And everything like that, and start kinda scheduling it out. Like give yourself a schedule for how you're going to put this together. A website isn't like carving in stone. Like you're not Yeah, it's not, I think a lot of people, the, one of the pain of getting a website, of doing a website redesign is that they put, they try and get everything that it will ever be.

In there for the launch. And I think that that makes it take a lot longer. It gets really defeating. Um, it feels like it's just, it feels like a grind. But that's why when you're putting together that content matrix, if you can identify like the high priority pages and the lower priority pages, like I would just consider launching with all your high priority pages, right, and knowing that you can backfill.

With a lot of your lower priority s and a lot of a, a few of our websites have launched that way where they're like, you know what, we're just gonna keep working on those sub sub pages. Yeah. After it's live. Yeah. But these big main buckets and the main structure of it, because that's really the critical point of this, is that it is harder to go back and change some of those big, big, high level things later on.

Yeah. So having that established put a priority on that for sure. Correct. 'cause you don't want to go back and then all of a sudden the navigation is. Changed or reorganized or something like that. But those smaller pages, those can be done much later. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing, and I know especially if you're taking this approach where you're launching with the high priority ones.

Mm-hmm. And you're gonna backfill, don't add coming soon pages don't, don't put, don't put under construction, don't like, I know you're, I know the intent that comes from doing that. Yeah. Like, like, Hey, we're letting people come here, know we're thinking about it. But you know what happens most of the time it just stays in that state.

Yeah. Like it's easy to forget. Oh, we put that page there. I don't know how many times we've gone to go do a redesign of a website and we're talking years. A website that's existed for years. Yeah. And we do an auditing thing and we see. Coming soon. Or the earth link like, like, um, animated GIF of, Hey, this page is under construction thing on these pages.

It's the dump truck with a gate. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and it's like. You know what? People aren't gonna miss, uh, people if you don't highlight it, people aren't even gonna notice. Exactly. Exactly. So they're not even gonna manage it. Right. There isn't a caveat to that. Oh. If it is important for something else you have going on.

So let's say you have an event coming up and you don't have all the details there. Yes. I wouldn't just say coming soon. That's kind of lame. You're like, you're leaving it up to them to remember, oh, I need to come back. To the website. They're not gonna remember works that, who's gonna remember that, right?

Nobody works that way. Yeah. But if it is something like that where there is you, it is your plan and you wanna do, like, think of it specifically in the events thing, like think it of as a save the date type thing. Save the date, more details are coming. Mm-hmm. Put an email sign up thing and then go, then let them know.

Mm. Nice. When it is ready Yep. Be, capture their attention there. But. Give them something to do that it doesn't gauge them in a sense. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Just please don't put a coming soon, okay. Please. I'll try not to. No more coming soon. It's so cute though, Mike, when it's like the little construction guy and her hammer, do you know how many times I've gone to a page where it I, I'm like, oh, I really wanna know what that is.

And it says, coming soon, and I just get mad. I'm like, well, I wanted that. I'm out. Yeah, yeah. I'm not coming back now. I've got everything I need to plan and build a website and design it. I've got it my. Basically, I've got my roadmap set out for me. Mm-hmm. I've got all my buckets, everything kind of organized.

I know where we were. I know what we need to do off to the races. Really call the design team, right? Yeah. Is that next step? Yeah. I mean, if you came to somebody with this plan, yeah. They would be able to give you so much. As a person who does this for clients? Yes. Like if they came to us with this plan.

Yeah. It would make it so easy for us to quote and scope and make sure that it's fitting under your budget. Yeah. The reason why you hear, oh, this website would be 5,000. Oh, this website would be 50,000. You're like, what the hell? Yeah. 'cause there's, this does not exist most of the time establishing this as a massive project unto itself.

Yeah. In fact, we offer it as a standalone. Service. Yeah. Just doing this. Yeah. Yeah. If this all sounds fun, not fun. If it does not sound fun at all and you want somebody to help you with this kind of thing, yeah, we do it all the time. It's our website blueprint, um, service, and it's helpful in that you get that outside perspective.

Which is huge. Yeah. The facilitation, the outside facilitation, especially in this establishing goals and everything is super helpful to you. It's harder to do when you're inside the inside, so I've learned a lot. Mike, I'm excited to redo my website. I don't have that. It says no one ever. Yeah, it says no one.

We're excited to redo people's websites. Yeah. We love it. But people's own websites, like if you ask, ask me, Hey, are you excited to redo the page design website? Which we've done. Which, yeah. Yeah. But we'll, like what's my first response? I see Eyes roll. Then there's usually a grunting sound. It's kind of a guttural thing.

Suppressed rage. Suppressed rage. Yeah. Yeah. There's usually the, I hear shattering glass. Yeah. About three or four minutes after we have this. So nobody, nobody likes to do it themselves. Exactly. Let's just, yeah. Yeah. But, but do this. It's worth your effort. Yes. It's so much cleaner. So really just to recap, audit everything.

Yep. Look at, look at, get a snapshot of where your website is now. Establish your goals and the purpose of the website goals for your. Audiences, define your audiences. Who are they? Prioritize 'em. That'll help you as you go into designing the information architecture for your website, your site map, the content structures that you have in your website.

Then get all that into a spreadsheet, into a content matrix that you can start planning things and then, um, and then start determining a schedule based on all of that stuff. Figure out. How long you need and what you can get done and who you need to bring in to help. I wouldn't try and do this all yourself.

You'll drive yourself nuts. Yeah. I think one of the pieces to that, as far as getting help, I know that we've often found tons of value with a copywriter helping copywriters or help to distill down a lot of that information. 'cause it's really hard to do that on your own sometimes. Yeah. I mean, you can do it, but a copywriter really helps to do that.

Yeah. Well now I'm really excited to redo a website. I mean, geez, I, I feel like I've got some knowledge now to like, go out and audit a website. I've never done that. But it sounds like, uh, it's fun if you like, if you like, uh, diagnosis of things. Yeah. If you like to diagnose. It's well, good thing I aligning with goals, you know?

Yep. That's always very in interesting to find out. Yeah. And to see the differences sometimes between organizations. Yeah. And what they think their goals are and what they eventually actually realize their goals might be. Yeah. Just more clarification, I guess, on that end. Yep. All right. This has been very good.

Appreciate it, Mike. Sounds like a good time to shut off the podcast at this point. Just cut the cameras, the mics. Let's, let's get outta here. Let's get outta here. Thanks Eric. Thanks a lot, man. Thank you. Thanks.

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