SiliconVerse

You are lucky that you have got time and resources to think and plan a big site re-design and a big launch but here are few reasons why not to re-design and launch your website overnight. Not applicable for you if you have no or almost nil users.

User experience: I use freeway 520 everyday and if you live in the same area where I do, you must have noticed lot of construction going on lately. Every other morning when I hit 520 I see vehicles slowing down(dead slow) because the road travelled yesterday is no longer detour to get to the destination. A big mind blocker.

Think of your new shiny website design as a ‘blocker’ for your users which would slow them down and even make them shoo away because they found a better stable road( competitor).

Availability: Believe me or not, its hard to deploy all pieces of complex portal in one shot successfully. I have seen it taking many days to complete a deployment by really smart people. Would you rather like your customers to see your old website(which was generating revenue) than keeping it down for two days!.

I wish construction at 520 finishes soon, its going on for more than a year.

SEO: Big redesigns often comes with change in the page URLs, because old URLs no longer make sense for the new design. But what about all that effort and money you have put last year to make your site/content appear on top of search results.

Damn! my GPS doesn’t recognize this new road, it doesn’t have latest map.

Business Intelligence: Moment you launch a completely overhauled website, its all gone. You are starting almost from scratch. This is because your assumption and pathing and funneling no longer holds true(most likely). You just re-designed whole thing. Fun part is even if you see increase in your traffic and revenues, you no longer know what to attribute it to.

Hmm, will it take 10 minutes or 15 minutes for me to reach office.

Marketing: I am sure if you club all that great features into one big yearly launch, you have got lot of material to talk about, BUT what you really need at the end of day is ability to retain and increase your user base and not just ‘noise’.

Signs reads as “heavy construction underway” 

I am not discouraging you from taking bold step, but yes its challenging to do it right even for the big guys across the street.

You need to re-design your site piece by piece, organically by not leaving your customers shocked/stranded in the places you thought are the masterpiece work of a developer/designer.

How do you re-design and launch your website? Share your thoughts below in comments.