There is more value to a site upgrade than just changing the visual design.
Common benefits
- Upgrade visual design
- Improve navigation and organization of content
- Upgrade to a professional and more capable CMS
- Add responsive design, access control, versioning, SEO tools, and other modern features
- Improve the workflows of site and content maintenance
- Opportunity to rework messaging and upgrade images
Seize all the value from all the benefits
We recommend that you consider each of the benefits we listed above to determine [a] if it’s time for your site upgrade as well as [b] how much do you want to accomplish with the upgrade project.
Unless your messaging needs a complete overhaul, we typically prefer to migrate the content to a fresh site built upon a professional CMS. In such a migration, everything is assessed and reworked as needed. We’ve seen clients want just a visual redesign, and once that’s completed they realize they need to upgrade all the other parts. It is more cost effective to do it all at the same time.
Don’t limit your goals for a site upgrade. Seize it as an opportunity to gain from its many benefits.
Example
A partner ad agency asked us to upgrade the website of one of their clients. The initial goal was to migrate to a modern CMS version so we could install a professional online ordering system. As we started, we quickly realized the need to overhaul the site’s information architecture. As the client saw incremental progress, they realized they needed additional upgrades – the visual design, responsive design for mobile versions, and even some changes in the business model for the site. By the time the project finished, the only thing that remained from the old site was the text, images, and product data.
upgrade eventually included:
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