Redeveloping vs. redesigning your website
Thursday, 27 May 2021 | Posted in: Most Recent, News | 6min read
Thursday, 27 May 2021 | Posted in: Most Recent, News | 6min read
Your website is a key sales and marketing tool. Quite commonly, it is your first interaction with your future customer/client so you can’t afford to “drop the ball” and cause them to look elsewhere. Times change, business grows, and challenges arise as the market changes.
All this change is reflected on your website as content updates, adding or removing products changing images and writing blogs – not to mention all the behind the scenes technical management that needs to occur.
As an agency, we often get asked ‘how frequently should we be making changes to our website?’ This leads to, ‘will a redesign help me accomplish my goals or do I need to redevelop the website?’
It is important to understand the difference between redeveloping and redesigning your website as each comes with unique motivating factors and solutions.
Think of your website as a renovation. Planning on gutting the place and starting new from the ground up? Or perhaps ripping the carpet out, installing a new fit-out and adding a fresh coat of paint is all that is required?
When it comes to your corporate website, a redesign retains the fundamentals – the underlying platform, code and hosting but applies a “new coat of paint” to the way it looks to users. It’s more of a visual change or necessary addition, rather than a complete overhaul of functionality. Redevelopment on the other hand is a blank canvas that allows you to reimagine how to present your products, services, and functionality to your users as well as introduce new efficiencies for your organisation. The redevelopment will often include a new code base, a modern development style, a new or significantly upgraded and a new design user interface.
First things first, you must ask yourself why is the change needed? What is the goal or primary motivation? What has occurred the requires you to think about making changes in the first place?
Do your research. With any project, there is a multi-phase process. Never jump in blind, you want to be clear on your objectives and make the necessary changes required to generate value for your business and customers, not to diminish it.
From this, you will discover the gaps and opportunities. This should then be discussed within your team, to your designers and developers (in-house and/or agency).
A great example of a redevelopment and redesign cycle is of our long-term client, StLukesHealth. We partnered with them on an initial redevelopment and a recent redesign. Take a look at their website journey from then to now:
Lastly, a budget will affect your decision making (as it does most things!). Understandably, a redevelopment is likely to be a more expensive task that will take time to plan and develop.
Our recommendation is to always research and analyse if your web strategy is meeting the business objectives, this is something we can assist with. Determining if they align is fundamental to then develop a priority list (if needed) to ascertain solutions. You may discover you need to do less or more than you originally thought, you need to redevelop the home page but redesigning other pages will suffice, or you may be able to do a minor redesign to solve immediate issues and schedule a major redevelopment later down the track.
Understand the differences, the possibilities and focus on using your data to drive your decision making.
TDE undertake a discovery phase to identify any issues and opportunities. If you require assistance to determine the best course of action, get in contact with our project team