Mistakes Institutions Make in Website Redesigns

And the six top mistakes I see institutions making when approaching a website redesign are these:

1. Thinking of your project as a redesign project when it’s really about redeveloping the site.

Sometimes what you need to do is to make your website look better, fresher, more au courant. But much more often, you need to re-think a lot of aspects of your web presence. Here are some of the important questions: Does the information architecture work? Does the navigation work? Is key content being syndicated and reused across the site? And, perhaps most important: Do you have adequate resources to sustain our website moving forward? Redevelopment from the ground up takes a while and is painful, but once it’s done, the next project can be a redesign project because you’ve addressed fundamental issues. (Read more about this in this blog entry.)

2. Thinking about your website from the perspective of your internal audience.

Your public website needs to be designed for visitors—people who don’t know your institution or how it’s organized. This plays out in major ways, such as determine the kind of content and services visitors need: for prospective students important services include the virtual tour, online application, and online scheduling. But there are many small but crucial details to watch. For example, many teens don’t understand that “academic program” is common institution-speak for “major,” the word that they scan for. Our thoughts about this issue here. [Of course, a different approach is required if you are designing a website like an intranet or portal whose target audience is internal.]

3. Paying too much attention to look and feel and neglecting content.

Sure, people make a snap judgment about your site based on its look and feel, so it has to look great. But I’m continually astounded by all the time people spend focusing on color and design, neglecting content completely. What are the key messages a visitor should take away from a visit to your site? What makes you different from your competitors? Can visitors find these things out when they visit your site? How about an academic department website? Ensuring that key messages appear across many pages on the site is a hard, but essential, component of a great website.

4. Asking for too much input.

When we’re doing a project, we love feedback. That’s why we do usability testing and have devised other ways of getting input from clients and visitors. The right input at the right time is essential. But too much input at every step of the process slows things down and, worse, impedes decisionmaking. Write content, do some wireframes, and test them to make sure that you’ve got content and navigation worked out. Refine your concepts and deploy surveys to determine if the concepts are creating the right impressions with your visitors. Ask prospective students to react to a beta site. But don’t deploy a wiki for comments on your content, or your concepts: it’s hard wading through all that unstructured input but if you’re on a deadline, parsing all that feedback will definitely slow things down. A lot.

5. Rushing things.

OK, we know your site isn’t that good and that people hate it. But we also know that if the site has to be redeveloped-rather than just redesigned-it will more than a couple of months to do it right. Remember that old adage, you can have two of three: fast, cheap, or good. So a project can happen quickly, but you’ll have to pay a lot of money or sacrifice quality. A lot of institutions select “fast and cheap,” forcing staff to do the work, and then end up having to redo a lot of sloppy coding and rework bad information architecture, content, or design later. If a project is being done by staff, your largest expense is time and time spent doing work that needs to be redone is wasteful and expensive. So take a couple of deep breaths and do some rational, strategic thinking about what needs to be done to your site, and then how you can accommodate those changes you can make within the timeframe desired.

6. Organizing a large team to build the site.

Great websites are built by teams-but not large ones. We encourage our clients to put together a project team that is representative of the institutionbut not too big. The team should include decisionmakers who know when to make a decision and when to consult with colleagues-as well as people who are going to be doing some of the day-to-day work on the project. It takes a lot of time to build a great website, especially in an environment where the team will need to build consensus, so the more people, the more complicated the process is and the longer it takes.