Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Hi K,

Dince you said you need to REDESIGN your existing site, I suggest you start with a laundry list of WHY.

Why does your website need a redesign? Is it not working for you, is it not working for your prospects and customers.

This might be a better productive starting point than thinking a strategy.

I secondly recommend (whoa - grammar anyone?) that you assemble a focus group of your most profitable customers and have them over for lunch, and videotape them using your website. Ask them to be honest and complain about everything that is wrong. This may require beer.

Next, watch the video tape and let that tell you where you need to focus your redesign efforts. Come up with some major pain points, so when those are fixed, you feel like you've really accomplished something.

When you are ready to look at web designers / developers. start local. By working local you'll have expert help nearby when you need it. Long distance development can often fall apart because of a lack of control that comes with proximity.

Ask your business friends and associates if they've heard anything good about local web design firms.

Then invite them in and have them watch the video tape. Discuss your pain points and get a feel for the relationship that is developing between you and the firm. The relationship will be key, because a major redesign (soup to nuts) requires alot of time and money, and you won't want to do it again after it gets messed up over incompatible relationships.

Start in small sections with the website overhaul. Create a completely different website address to test, so you can play and break the new site without rushing to get the site fixed, etc. If the first couple of small tasks get done correctly, you can proceed to bigger ta$k$.

Let us know how it goes...

I realized I forgot to mention some ballpark cost figures.

Depending upon your location and the talent you choose to build your website:


Marketplace Research / Competition Analysis / Position and Strategy Development - $5K - $7K

User Interviews / User Model Development (Customer Profile) - $2K

System Architecture / Use Case Development (How the site will work) - $3K

Design Elements / Product and Service Photography - $5K - $10K depends on qty

Process / Programming / Testing - $5K - $10K depends on complexity

User Testing - $5K [don't worry, you can skip this. everyone does :-) ]

Revisions - $3K

Site Launch - $1K

Search Engine Positioning / Link Exchange for Page Rank - $3K

Offline Promotion - $5K+ depends on your hunger for fast results

Usage Analysis (how are visitors finding your site, what are they doing once they get there) - $4K

Future Revisions / Maintenance - $5K


All told, $46K plus.

Of course you can get it done cheaper or more expensive, just as you can win the lottery, or get hit by a car.

Weight this investment against your current sales and profit from the current site, and the potential for sales once it is rebuilt. You should be in the 10-12% range of investment versus payback on a yearly basis. Websites change so often that you can barely look ahead 1 year.

Pardo,

Excellent points. Since K indicated it was an existing site tat needed a redesign, I assumed there was existing traffic, and just suggested the search engine optimization. If it were a new site, I would add the suggestion of paid advertising (ppc).

I anticipated metrics under Usage analysis, but I may not have described it enough. Thanks for your expansion of the topic.

Email marketing is a task that I assumed would be performed by internal sales staff, using a web application that was developed by the web developing team. Once it's setup, they would provide the content. Therefore I didn't list that as a separate budget, yet it is a cost factor since the internal sales staff needs to get paid.

Thanks for adding to the topic.