What comes next after the launch party buzz wears off?

Life After the Redesign

By Jeff and Jeni Cram
June 18, 2008

Going through a website redesign is a mammoth undertaking for any organization. It involves rethinking the site’s content, design, technology and underlying business strategy. Large internal teams are formed, outside experts are assembled, budgets are expanded and complex Gantt charts are created. In short – it’s both exhilarating and exhausting.

But what happens after the site launches and the dust settles? Organizations that can sustain momentum and create a culture of continuous improvement can outpace their peers and create true competitive advantage online.

The Buzz Killers

A large-scale website redesign project creates a lot of new work and processes that will live long after the project is complete. This can be a challenge for organizations that haven’t planned in advance.

After all, the heat of development is an all-hands effort, yet post launch is a different picture. The core team disbands, internal stakeholders go back to regular jobs and consultants move on to the next client.

It’s absolutely critical to identify these new business processes and ensure the organization is staffed and equipped to handle them. This may include:

A content management system that decentralizes content authoring, but effectively adds responsibility to a new group of people who already have too much work.
Customer support tools which require people to monitor incoming inquiries and questions.
An e-commerce system that adds new fulfillment and order management responsibilities.
Community-driven features that require active moderation and nurturing.
A revamped content strategy that requires editorial oversight to both create new content and ensure consistent voice.
An analytics system that requires training, support and user enablement.
A social media strategy that requires management of external platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Organizations that don’t proactively identify and properly staff for these processes will risk a website that may never get traction or just fade in its brilliance over time.

Shifting Analytics Gears

A lot of time is typically spent on measurement planning during the redesign process. This may include reviewing old data, defining new key performance indicators, tagging the site and configuring reports. However, you’ll need a much different measurement mindset post launch.

First off, realize that your numbers may actually dip out the gate. This is fairly frightening for the fearless web leader promising bigger and better results. However, wholesale shifts in site architecture, content and user experience can take time to settle in. Plus, don’t assume you got everything right with your upfront strategy.

There are some immediate steps to take post launch with analytics:

Take a Fresh Baseline: Spend less time worrying how the new site compares to the previous and instead focus on the trend lines moving forward.
Audit Key Conversion Scenarios: Watch how people are moving through your top conversion funnels. Are there unexpected drop offs between key steps or technical issues that slipped through QA preventing successful conversions.
Check Inbound Traffic: Are key search terms and link partners still driving similar traffic? You’ll likely find some major links that aren’t redirected properly or SEO rankings that took an unexpected dive.
Create Scorecards: Track all of your KPIs on a regular basis in a scorecard which identifies trends and can easily be shared with others.

After that, it’s all about optimization: Shifting into an actionable and optimization-oriented approach to measurement is the key to driving results. It’s easier said than done, but well worth the effort.

Keeping Momentum

Sustained post-launch success comes down to keeping year-round momentum. Numerous tactics can help keep spirits high and ensure the website continuously evolves.

Establish an Editorial Calendar: Create a schedule for publishing new content and ensuring the site remains fresh.
Build on Previous Successes: Focus on continuous improvement driven by tactics such as A/B testing to incrementally improve key sections of the site.
Reward Progress: Find ways to have smaller celebrations along the way and identify top performing team members.
Communicate Upstream: Keep the executive team informed and in the loop while staying aligned with the corporate strategy.
Document Everything: Create style guides and document key processes to ensure new team members and external consultants can easily pick up where someone else left off.
Instill Ownership: Give team members distinct roles and ownership of specific sections of the site.
Share Ideas: Get the folks who work on the web together in person for monthly or quarterly meetings to share ideas and discuss progress.
Welcome Outside Perspective: Invite external experts in the field to present on trends, bring new ideas into the organization and energize the team.
Show Visible Progress: Proactively work to create scorecards that clearly articulate achievements and key metrics to the rest of the organization.

It takes as much work as the redesign itself to keep momentum following the launch. In fact it may be more prudent to avoid the major redesign altogether, spread out your resources and publish smaller ongoing iterations.

Whatever approach you take, be sure to take a holistic look at the ongoing management of your website. And try to have some fun in the process – after all, you get to work on the web for a living right?

About the Authors

Jeff Cram is the managing director and co-founder of ISITE Design. In addition to running ISITE Design’s Boston office, he helps create and shape digital strategies with clients large and small. Jeff co-authored the article with his wife Jeni Cram who works as an interactive project manager at Massachusetts General Hospital. Jeni’s 11-year interactive career has spanned government, non-profit and agency work with a focus on web operations management, online marketing and project management.